


Gentle Night, Little Stars

by noodlefrog



Series: Close Enough to Human [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 18th Century, 19th Century, Aftermath of Torture, Angst and Feels, Anxiety, Aziraphale Has a Penis (Good Omens), Aziraphale Has a Vulva (Good Omens), Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale Loves Crowley's Eyes (Good Omens), Aziraphale's Bookshop (Good Omens), Blood and Injury, Boning While Pining, Breaking Up & Making Up, Comfort Sex, Consent Checking, Crowley Has A Vulva (Good Omens), Crowley Has a Penis (Good Omens), Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley has a penis and a vulva, Crowley's Eyes (Good Omens), Don't copy to another site, Duelling Service Tops, Emotional Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Friends With Benefits, Historical, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Torture, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Making an Effort (Good Omens), Miscommunication, Missing Scene, Non-Graphic Violence, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Plant abuse, Pre-Relationship, Secret Relationship, Self-Esteem Issues, Switching, Trauma, Very very light D/S, and it's all pretty soft and doting, canon-typical alcohol use, consensual body modification, emotionally fraught blowjobs, individual sex acts to be listed in the chapter notes, light monsterfuckery, the series will have a happy ending I promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:27:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 185,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23466103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noodlefrog/pseuds/noodlefrog
Summary: When it came to his higher-ups, and even God Herself, Aziraphale had grown used to talking without being listened to, to being watched without being seen. He would of course deny that to anyone who asked. He denied it even to himself. The trouble, though, with hearing again and again that you are unimportant and unworthy of notice is that over time you will come to believe it.Aziraphale made the mistake of letting the wine and friendly company relax him. He made the mistake of forgetting just how much Crowley could hear when he wanted to really listen, just how much he could see when he turned those amber eyes on an angel most practiced at lying to people who didn’t care enough to doubt him.The Arrangement changes. Aziraphale builds a home. Crowley tries to find his place Earth as well as in the angel's life. Trapped in a no-win situation, they decide to take what they can get and love each other in secret... even if the risk is too great to say as much out loud.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Close Enough to Human [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1578430
Comments: 724
Kudos: 201





	1. Nibbles

**Author's Note:**

> This work is the third work in a series, but if you want to jump in here, that’s cool too. I’ve stuck a one-sentence spoiler in the endnote in case you want to see where the last one ended and start reading.
> 
>  ~~As I have the story outlined currently, it's looking like this work will end at a sad spot in the canonical timeline (after the Holy Water scene). This work will likely end on a downer note, but the series itself will end happily. I promise.~~ EDIT: I scooted the timeline around and it's going to end after 1941. Not the downer ending it could have been, but still prior to them being able to get together properly. Also, as a heads up, starting with chapter 3 this thing essentially becomes a porn with plot for _several_ chapters.
> 
> To keep the theme going, the title for this piece comes from Romeo and Juliet. This time, we head to Act III Scene II, where Juliet waits for night to fall so that she can sneak her new husband up to her bedroom for their wedding night.
>
>>   
>  _Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,_   
>  _Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,_   
>  _Take him and cut him out in little stars,_   
>  _And he will make the face of heaven so fine_   
>  _That all the world will be in love with night_   
>  _And pay no worship to the garish sun._   
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Notes:** The boys drink a lot in this chapter, and in the next one. It's about on par with the level of drinking that happens in the show/book, but it's still not super healthy.  
> There is minor discussion of historical violence re: the Reign of Terror, but nothing graphic.  
> There will also be some fairly explicit discussion of past sex acts, and some playing around with the notion of Making An Effort, though the actual smut doesn't come in until next chapter.
> 
> If any of my French is wrong I'm blaming it on Aziraphale.

The letter had been waiting for him at his approved London residence, gleaming white in the evening’s half-light from the windows in an empty room. He’d been afraid to open it, afraid of what he might be accused—it was so like Gabriel, wasn’t it, to come back with more to say the moment Aziraphale thought he was rid of him?

_“Principality Aziraphale,”_ it began, once he’d steeled his nerves enough to open it. _“In light of your proposal for dispensation of a permanent residence and local headquarters in London, we have performed an audit of the final twenty-four hours of your recent mission in Stockholm…”_

Aziraphale wasn’t human. He was an angel. His heart did not need to beat, his palms did not need to sweat, and if he willed it, he could force his corporation to be as still and impassive as marble. But as he scanned over the list, searching for something that would damn him—damn _them_ —he did not feel particularly angelic. He felt all too human, heart beating a bruise on his ribs, hands sweaty and shaking, and also very powerless.

_“Continuous abuse of frivolous miracles indicates a lack of responsibility and discipline, both of which are essential qualities for the position you are asking to assume. If you are interested in your proposal being taken seriously, you would do well to set an example for your fellow angels as a representative of Earth.”_

He read it so quickly the first time that his eyes could barely make out the words. He forced himself to slow down the second time through, slow enough to memorize the words and how they felt.

They'd been careful—no, that was a lie. They'd been completely, _blindingly_ reckless, but they had at least avoided any miracles that would have hinted at what they had done. It had been luck, though, not strategy, and Aziraphale cursed himself for actually letting himself start to believe that he was safe. That _they_ were safe.

The letter served as a stark reminder that they would never be safe.

Even still, the portrait that the audit painted was not one of an illicit liaison with a member of the opposition. For once in his life, Aziraphale felt perversely grateful for the way his superiors saw him. Peculiar Aziraphale. Lazy Aziraphale. Gluttonous Aziraphale. Aziraphale, the angel who had grown too used to Earth. Aziraphale, who burned precious miracles from Heaven to light a fire, to pull too many blankets from the firmament, to keep a cup of coffee warm. His superiors looked at all the scattered pieces of evidence from that winter's night in Stockholm and drawn a picture of a cozy evening indoors insulated by humanity's minor pleasures. Embarrassing, not something befitting an angel, a Principality, an agent who needed to do better if he wanted to be given responsibility over one of Heaven's bases of operations on Earth... but they hadn't seen a _traitor_. They hadn't seen the Arrangement. They hadn't seen him trying to save the life of his hereditary enemy when he'd found him half dead in the snow.

They just saw Aziraphale. Simple, small, embarrassing Aziraphale. And for once, he was grateful that was all they had seen.

On the ship back from Stockholm, Aziraphale had passed many of his evenings writing in a small notebook. Different drafts of a letter, most of them crossed out, none of them good enough. Some leaned more towards apology for the way things had been left and things that had been said. Other drafts were more descriptive, frank explanations of what had happened and why. All asked after a certain demon's health and wished him well. Most began with, _“Dearest C”._ Most ended with, _“-A,”_ but on a few others he had been bold enough to sign it, _“xx, A”._

There had been no time to say any of that before he'd been called away. His plan had been to write out a clean, final draft of the letter upon his arrival in London and discreetly miracle it to Crowley's Stockholm flat.

He understood that there were no more discreet miracles anymore. Not until Heaven grew tired of watching him.

Aziraphale's hands shook as he built the fire in the hearth. He told himself this was only because he was so out of practice doing this the human way.

What was one more lie, in the wake of all the others he’d told himself?

He watched as the flames licked over his notebook, as the edges of the pages caught and burned. Every sentence, carefully chosen over his weeks at sea, gone in minutes. The _Dearest C's_ and the _A's_ , the _I'm sorry's_ and the _I miss you's_ , that one tiny _I love you_ crossed out so many times the ink had bled through to the next page. Every single word destroyed. He couldn't keep any record that could be found.

This wasn't an end. Just a... pause. Sooner or later, he and Crowley would cross paths again. They always did. It shouldn't take too long this time. The world was in turmoil, and their services were often needed in the same places. Aziraphale could be patient. He'd been patient this far, and he could do it again. All he had to do was wait. Wait, and not lose his nerve when the opportunity finally came for him to say what he needed to.

As the notebook burned down to the binding, he thanked the Almighty that She had seen fit to spare them. That She had given them a second chance.

He didn't know if he was hoping that She had heard him, or if he was hoping that She hadn't.

* * *

  
**Paris, 1793**

They’d been walking for a while, nearly an hour by Crowley’s estimation, but Aziraphale seemed like he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. His animated recounting of the rudeness of the guards and revolutionaries he’d met had continued unabated from the moment the prison doors had shut behind them. Crowley couldn’t listen, though, not really. He had other things to pay attention to as they walked, his eyes scanning the shadows and alleys they passed, and Aziraphale’s voice settled into a comforting background hum. He didn’t talk back. Opening his mouth was a bad idea. The taste of Parisian revolution was already coating his tongue, and he didn’t want to breathe in any more of it than he had to. Crowley had no plans to eat today, but the smell of blood and filth in the city had been cloying enough to turn even his mostly decorative stomach. As they put more and more distance between them and the prison, the air began to clear, and Crowley’s mind along with it.

Without really meaning to, Crowley had led them in the direction of where he was staying—the most recent place, at least. He’d been in France for too long, and he had been restless. This was probably the fourth or fifth place he'd stayed in Paris itself, and this had been after a few months of writing reports on what he'd seen in Verdun and Nantes.

For the last six weeks, he’d been staying in an inn at the very edge of the city at the foot of Montmartre—recently renamed _Mont-Marat_ , though if he remembered this place at all, Aziraphale would probably remember it as _Mons Martis_. The inn was more of an off-the-books bordello than anything else, but that at least looked good in his files. The mattress was lumpy, and window had a draft, but it was quiet outside at night, and Crowley could see the stars overhead when he staggered back drunk at the end of the day. Six weeks was almost long enough to get used to it all. Almost long enough for it to get under his skin, to make him itch, to want to throw it all away—the room and the clothes and the person he was pretending to be when he was here—and build up something new somewhere else.

At some point, after he recognized where he’d been taking them to, Crowley decided on a place to take Aziraphale for his _bloody crêpes_. The wine there was excellent—he’d had more than enough of it in the past weeks to have developed an informed opinion—but it was a proper little restaurant instead of a bar, and you could smell the food cooking all the way up the block. He’d never admit it, but he’d even eaten there once or twice. The owner was chatty, too, which was the kind of thing Aziraphale tended to appreciate, and although it had been strange having the same human recognize him enough to talk to him more than once, Crowley couldn’t say it was unpleasant.

Every so often, though not often enough to make it seem like a habit, he looked back over at Aziraphale as they walked. He was still babbling on about something, the lace at his wrists fluttering as he waved his hands about to make a point, and if Crowley hadn’t seen it for himself, he wouldn’t have guessed that just an hour before the angel had been clapped in irons and waiting patiently for his turn at the guillotine. Aziraphale seemed every bit his brightest, happiest self, and Crowley was struggling to understand how that could be.

The clothes were one of the only visual clues that something was wrong, the colors too dark and the fabrics too rough for the angel’s tastes. Aziraphale had at least stripped off the cap and the pennant and cockade, casting them onto a rubbish heap in distaste almost immediately after leaving the prison. With the cap gone, Crowley could see that the delicate styling Aziraphale had done to his hair had since been flattened out. It did nothing to stop him from wanting to run his fingers through those white-blond curls. Aziraphale kept tugging at the sleeves of the jacket like the fit of it was uncomfortable, which meant that Crowley had to also quash the ridiculous urge to offer that they swap. Of note, this was also perhaps the first time in centuries he'd seen Aziraphale in full length trousers. Crowley was simultaneously amused to see the angel on the bleeding edge of fashion and disappointed that he didn’t get to see the way his calf filled out a stocking.

He looked away again. That line of thinking was dangerous. He’d promised to control himself the next time he and Aziraphale met, to keep things light and friendly and familiar. To do nothing to remind the angel of the last time they’d met, that cold night in Stockholm with lips and wandering hands and quiet gasps in the dark. Things Crowley couldn’t forget, but that Aziraphale clearly wanted to. The angel hadn’t spoken to him for a year and a half, and Crowley wasn’t about to force that conversation now.

He told himself he’d be a good friend and ignore it, and so far, he’d managed to hold his tongue. It was easy, by comparison, to not say anything about it. He’d been not saying it for thousands of years by now. It was not thinking about it that was proving impossible, as he’d had those same thousands of years to find a way to get the angel off his mind and continued to come up empty even after all this time.

This time, Crowley had taken more drastic steps to ensure that his body would comply. He had panicked for just a moment while he’d been hurrying towards the prison, irrationally afraid that Aziraphale would somehow be able to tell that his name had been on Crowley’s lips as he touched himself only hours before. With a gesture like flicking water off of his hand, he had banished any semblance of genitalia from his corporation. His breeches didn’t fix exactly right anymore, the front of his pelvis now comically smooth, and he’d reminded himself to have a good laugh about it later if he managed to get through the day without Aziraphale calling him a letch and telling him to fuck off and not come back.

As it had happened, though, his traitorous corporation had been ready to help him make a fool of himself even if he was as blank as the day he’d been created. Even without anything in his loins that could be stirred, the sight of Aziraphale coiffed and clean and smelling like Heaven still had his heart racing and his guts squirming. He had wanted nothing more than to touch and to hold and to pet and caress and kiss. Embarrassing, really. Those manacles on his wrists, though… even with his sex drive theoretically turned all the way off, Crowley still had a working memory, and he knew himself well enough to realize he wouldn’t be getting the sight of those out of his mind for at least another century. He fully expected to wank himself raw over it the moment he was alone again.

A day hadn’t gone by in the last year and a half where he hadn’t thought about the feeling of Aziraphale’s hands on him. _In him._ Their first time, yes, but also their _last time_. That had been how he’d rationalized it after Aziraphale had left him in Stockholm, talking of duty and _not talking_ about the way they’d touched. It had happened and then been over so quickly Crowley could have almost convinced himself he’d dreamed it.

Their… encounter, he supposed he could call it, had been a fluke. An aberration. Not something to be repeated, something to be ignored. If Crowley hadn’t been so pathetically gone for him, he would have seen it for what it was at the time. An experiment, a curiosity, a desire to try out another of humanity’s pleasures… and who had been there for him to try it with but the one being who wouldn’t judge an angel for his curiosity? The being who _couldn’t_ judge him, who understood better than possibly anyone else the all-consuming hunger for knowledge held just out of reach. Aziraphale had clearly tried to pretend that it hadn’t been _Crowley_ he’d reached out for, had avoided looking into the eyes of the Serpent of Eden, and saw it for the mistake it was once it was over. The only time he spoke of it before he left was to ask, in the heat of an argument, if Crowley had _tempted him_ into it.

The words had stung, but over time Crowley had come to accept why Aziraphale had said them. For a few moments, the barriers the angel always so carefully kept raised between them had fallen, and after it was over he needed a hard reset, something harsh to say to put distance between them again and take things back to the way things had been before it happened. Opposite sides. Hereditary enemies. Angel, demon. Friends, though, too, in spite of everything. Not what Crowley wanted, of course. He would have done anything, _literally anything,_ for it to have meant something more. But it couldn’t, not ever. And he’d been doing a good job working on accepting that part of it, too. He was actually managing to be happy in some broken little way that this hadn’t torn them apart.

A year and a half they had been parted, Aziraphale in London and Crowley in Paris, hard at work for their bosses with not a word exchanged between them. Crowley had wanted to give the angel space, had wanted to make himself small and scarce and nonthreatening. _His choice, it has to be his choice to come back,_ he’d reminded himself again and again, alone in his bed and tangled in sweaty, messy sheets. _If you chase him, he’ll run._

For a year and a half, Crowley had stayed away, and then that blasted idiot had shown up in Paris. Gotten himself arrested, nearly _beheaded,_ all for some nosh he could have miracled up for himself in a heartbeat. Crowley hadn’t believed that shite about frivolous miracles for a second, no more than he’d believed that Aziraphale had only come over for the food. He’d been lied to by the angel often enough to hear when his words were hollow—the only trouble was, Aziraphale lied to himself even more than he lied to Crowley. So why, pray tell, the fuck was he here? Why had Aziraphale, cautious, risk averse Aziraphale, come over across the channel on what seemed to be no more than a social call?

Crowley wasn't squeamish. He'd seen death in all its many forms across the centuries, seen the full spectrum of anguish play out both on Earth and below it. He was more or less used to it by now, and after a year and a half of living here he'd seen enough people brought to the guillotine to be desensitized to the sound of it coming down on a neck.

But it wasn't just the death. There was a whole spectacle to it. It drew crowds. Women brought their knitting, people brought their kids, all to watch some poor bastard beg and plead and die and piss his breeches. The court system was a joke, if you even got a trial, if you weren't just hauled off to die. If the mob didn't decide to kill you right there in the street. Aziraphale hadn't been here long, so he must have just been taken to the prison straight from wherever he'd been found wandering around in his silk and asking for directions to the nearest _crêperie_ in broken French.

Crowley had a vision of the angel shining in his pinks and creams in the back of a tumbrel on his way to the block. He would have probably done something stupid and noble and pointless, like try to offer counsel to any other idiots riding to their deaths along with him. Try to save their souls. He'd have probably tried to be soothing, tried to keep that voice of his soft and gentle, but Crowley knew how loud the crowds got when they jeered. He knew the kind of insults they threw at the people in those carts, and that sometimes they threw more than words. No. The angel would have had to yell to be heard, and even then, it wouldn't have mattered. The people in the crowd were hungry to see people stripped of their dignity and pride, wanted them terrified and humiliated before they died. And right now, Crowley was struggling with the idea that Aziraphale might have let that same thing happen to himself.

In his nearly six thousand years on Earth, Crowley had never been discorporated. To his knowledge, neither had Aziraphale. Crowley had come close enough, though, to understand that it really fucking hurt. He had imagination enough to extrapolate an idea of what it probably felt like to go all the way, to have your corporation mangled so badly it couldn't hold you in it anymore. He knew Aziraphale loved his body, had spent millennia settling into it and shaping it the way he wanted. It was a place of comfort for him. It knew what he liked, all the pleasures he found in food and drink and the feel of silk on skin. If Crowley hadn't been there, if he hadn't noticed in time, if Aziraphale hadn’t saved himself… it would have been destroyed. The last sensations Aziraphale would have known in his beloved body would be the feeling of shackles at his wrists, the sound the crowd laughing at him, and the agony of a blade.

And then what? With his body destroyed, what then? Would he be given a new one and sent back down? In Hell, it could take centuries to get the paperwork through. He couldn't imagine Heaven was much better. And would they even return him at all, or would they send some other angel in his place?

Aziraphale could have freed himself at any moment... but he hadn't. He walked into the middle if a revolution with a paper-thin excuse for why he'd decided to risk so much and had done absolutely nothing to save himself.

No matter how this looked, he knew Aziraphale wasn’t stupid. But he was loyal, _dangerously loyal_ , when it came to Heaven. If they’d sent down an order for Aziraphale to martyr himself, Crowley knew the odds were good that Aziraphale would have gone through with it. That wasn’t what had happened today, though. He’d let Crowley take the manacles from his wrists, let him take him out of that cell, all without a word about him thwarting some higher plan. With nothing more than a token protest and some babbling about paying him back with lunch.

As Crowley held the café door open, watched the angel breathe in the heady smell of the best _crêpes_ Montmartre had to offer, a strange and unsettling idea occurred to him.

_Did he want to be saved?_ Crowley asked himself as he followed Aziraphale inside. _Or did he want to get hurt?_

* * *

  
If Crowley had been strangely quiet on the walk over, Aziraphale had been in too good of a mood to pay it much mind. Besides, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Crowley could be quite taciturn at times, typically when he was playing at being a mysterious and menacing demon. Once they arrived at the restaurant he had stalked towards a table in the far corner of the room where he could sit with his back to the wall and stare at the door. Routine, at this point, as much as any part of their clandestine meetings could feel routine. Aziraphale had thought little of it outside of the thrill he always felt when they managed to sneak away somewhere together.

The restaurant Crowley had chosen for their lunch had been in a somewhat shabby part of town, and neither its nondescript exterior nor its almost-vacant interior gave Aziraphale much warning for how good the food was going to be. When their first plates arrived, however, he had almost been stunned at the decadence of it, especially in such lean times. They ate—or rather, Aziraphale ate—in relative quiet. Crowley drank steadily, watched steadily, and only broke his silence after the owner departed from bringing Aziraphale’s second helping.

“Was it worth it, then?” He drawled. Crowley’s eyes were unreadable behind those dark glasses, but there was a tension in his seemingly casual pose that Aziraphale couldn't miss if he tried.

“Pardon?”

“This. Your... _nibbles,_ ” he continued, gesturing with the hand that held his wine glass. Aziraphale watched the movement like a man hypnotized, the swirling crest and fall of that deep red liquid in contrast with those slender, pale fingers and the roll of the joint of his wrist, barely peeking out from the shadow of his sleeve.

“Yes... _Yes,_ these _crêpes_ are a delight,” Aziraphale said, looking away from the hand and back down to his plate. He took another bite, and oh, it wasn’t a lie. His first dish had been the most delectable _crêpes completes_ , the yolk of the egg golden as a sunrise and the Gruyère melted to perfection, all washed down with several glasses of _cidre_ that positively danced on the tongue. It had been so good he’d had no choice but to order another plate for dessert.

“Worth nearly getting your head cut off for?”

The chair creaked as Crowley leaned forward in his seat, resting his elbow on the tabletop. He held the glass up between them, and an outside observer might have thought he looked bored—his eyes, though covered, were seemingly locked on his drink, watching it swirl as if to kill the time. Aziraphale knew better, though. He knew he was being watched, and he decided to put on a show.

Aziraphale cut off a portion of his _crêpes à la confiture_ , the bite ever so slightly bigger than what was polite, and chased the bit of plum preserve that spilled out back onto his fork. He inhaled deeply to take in the scent of good food and wine... and beneath it all, just the faintest hint of _Crowley_.

Fork hovering at his lips, he gave a bashful smile and said, “You always find the best places.” Then, he opened his mouth and took the bite, closing his lips around the fork and letting it drag a little against them as he withdrew. He had to keep his eyes closed for this part, he knew, but he often wished he could see his serpent's face in these moments. It would never do, of course. Crowley only watched like this when he thought he wasn't being noticed.

He gave a sigh and a little shimmy in his seat. There was barely any acting involved, the _crêpes_ really were divine, but despite what his higher ups and maybe even Crowley himself believed, Aziraphale actually _could_ control himself when presented with truly scrummy food. He didn't want to _act like it_ at the present, though. That was part of the fun, letting himself behave for just a moment like his reactions, maybe even his _actions_ , were just beyond the cusp of his ability to control them.

Aziraphale had dined with kings and popes and wealthy merchants, tasting the finest cuts of meat and the most expensive spices. He was also completely willing to admit that some of the most delicious meals he'd tasted had been cooked over a spit above a campfire, or in the kitchen of a cheap and crowded inn. Though he appreciated the benefit of fresh ingredients and a talented chef, the difference, he figured, often came from the company in which one ate. Teasing Crowley like this, then, elevated the quality of his meal more than he could justify as incidental.

“Right,” Crowley said, his voice tight. “Well… Been around, you know. Here. For a while.” He took a steadying sip of his wine, and promptly choked into it as Aziraphale licked a stray bit of powdered sugar from his lower lip.

“You haven’t been here this whole time, have you?” Aziraphale asked. He tried to remind himself Crowley had been in worse places—they both had, really—including Hell itself, but things in Paris were so miserable at the moment it was hard to keep that perspective in mind. The late October weather was dreary and cold and wet, the nights growing longer and longer by the day, and one couldn’t go too close to certain parts of town without coming away smelling like an abattoir.

“Not just Paris, no. Different places around France, though, yeah,” Crowley said with a shrug, sounding as if the words took a certain amount of effort to arrive. “And you? How’s… ah… How’s London? Bookshop? You opened yet?”

Aziraphale made a face and straightened the sleeves of his rather scratchy new jacket. He’d managed to keep his own shirt when he’d swapped with the executioner, but the heavy cuffs irritated the chafing left on his wrists from his shackles even through the ruffles of his shirtsleeves. He noticed that Crowley was watching his hands, and quickly dropped them into his lap

“Not yet, I’m afraid,” he said, smiling. “These things take time, or so I’m told.”

“What timescale are we talking here? Months? Decades?”

“I have high hopes for the turn of the century.” Under the table, Aziraphale was twisting his ring around his finger. “If all of the paperwork goes through as expected.”

Crowley scoffed. “They told you yes in early ’92. That’s eight whole years.”

“I’m glad to see you can do sums,” Aziraphale sniped.

“Why is it going to take eight years? I thought that’s was the point of miracles,” the demon asked. “Bypassing all the petty human stuff and getting what you need faster than they can.”

“The _point_ of miracles is to facilitate the execution of Her Plan, and to lead humans to Her,” Aziraphale corrected, looking down at his hands. “Not simple… _convenience_.”

“Alright, show me the pamphlet you’ve got stashed away under there,” Crowley said, leaning down to peek under the table. Aziraphale let go of his ring and flattened both palms against his thighs.

_“Really,”_ he scolded. “And anyway, it isn’t Earthly paperwork I’m worried about. It also depends on whether my higher-ups are satisfied at my next check-ins.”

“Really,” Crowley repeated, his eyebrows raising over the tops of his sunglasses. “And what exactly are they checking in about?”

Aziraphale hesitated, weighing what was safe to disclose and what he thought Crowley would even be interested in hearing. “At this point, a lot of it is explaining to them what I want to accomplish and how I plan to embed the shop into human society.”

“And how’s that going?”

“You know, I had to explain the concept of the economy to them. Again.” Aziraphale sighed and took a long drink. “It's as though they don't even read my reports.”

“Or the ones I write for you,” Crowley murmured, a wry tilt to his lips.

“ _Keep your voice down,_ ” Aziraphale urged, wincing as he put his wine glass down a touch too hard on the table. It sounded so loud to him, like it would draw the attention of the whole restaurant. He cast an eye around the room, to the humans paying them no heed, over his shoulder to the door... above them, to the ceiling...

Crowley shifted in his seat, stretching those long legs of his even further under the table. “Relax, angel. Remember, they don't care about us as long as we check their little boxes on time.”

The tense silence that followed was broken by the reappearance of the café owner at their table. She had a new bottle of wine, which Crowley nodded at and let her set on the tabletop, and then she drew Crowley’s attention away with a series of rapid-fire questions. Aziraphale looked at them with polite detachment and said nothing, for it was like a window had been shut between the three of them and he now found himself on the outside. Crowley and the human were both speaking too quickly for him to parse their French without spending a minor miracle.

Crowley said something that must have been very funny, given the way she giggled behind her hand, and Aziraphale gave a vague smile in response as her eyes drifted over him in what looked like appraisal. He couldn’t tell what her verdict was, or what she was looking for, but her attention was called back to Crowley as he spoke again, and Aziraphale felt a brief squirm of discomfort at her answering laughter. Crowley had clearly made a joke, and he wondered if it had been at his expense.

As poor as Aziraphale’s French was, he understood enough to be able to tell that there was a degree of familiarity between the pair of them, as he caught Crowley’s name nestled somewhere in the woman’s words. She was dressed every bit the revolutionary, cockade pinned to her cap—had they met as a part of Crowley’s work? He said he hadn’t been involved, but he was here, wasn’t he? He’d been in Paris almost as long as Aziraphale had been in London, nearly a year and a half, ever since they’d parted ways in Stockholm…

As the human left and Crowley began trying to wrestle the cork out of the bottle, Aziraphale asked, “Do you come here often?”

“What?”

“She seemed to know your name, that’s all.”

“Oh. Right. I’ve been in a few times, I suppose,” Crowley said, noncommittal, finally breaking the seal with a pop. “Wine’s good.”

“It is,” Aziraphale conceded, offering his own empty glass for a refill. “Though I may have missed part of what she was saying.”

Crowley gave a dry laugh as he poured. “She was thanking us for coming in. She says her lunchtime business has all but dried up, since everyone’s always out watching the executions.”

Aziraphale glanced around them. The empty tables, which had at first felt like a perk, an invitation to enjoy their meal without worrying about eavesdropping humans, now felt rather ominous. There were only two other beings present at all, a pair of older women playing cards across the bar in a haze of pipe smoke, and they looked like employees.

“Well,” he said, taking another bite of his _crêpe_. “That explains why the service was so prompt.”

Crowley’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “I told her if she wanted to make more money, she should get a cart and sell her food beside the guillotine.”

He gaped. “Crowley! Why would you try to tempt someone into doing a ghastly thing like that?”

“Demon.” Crowley shrugged. “Besides, I would wager the bill that the only reason she hasn’t already is that there are already too many people doing exactly that. Too crowded.” A snort. “Typical for you to try and get executed somewhere serving concessions.”

Aziraphale pointedly ignored the latter half of Crowley’s words, instead saying, “We will not be wagering the bill. I’m covering it, remember? As a th—for this morning.”

“She asked about you, you know.”

“Oh?” Aziraphale sat up a little straighter.

“She told me she was surprised a bastard like me found someone to drink with,” Crowley said, scratching the stubble under his chin. “And she asked if I was just trying to get close enough to pick your pocket.”

“So that’s what you’re doing here? Petty crime?”

“No more than usual,” he sighed. “She likes to joke like that every time I come in. _Where do you get ze money for all zat wine?_ ” He affected her accent, high pitched and slurred. “ _Did you steal eet?_ ”

Aziraphale dropped his voice low. “Couldn’t you… _you know_ …” He wiggled his fingers.

“Nah.” Crowley shrugged. “She’s just trying to goad me into gossip. Sometimes I make up something funny. I think she just wants to have something to chat about that isn’t the same _liberté, égalité, fraternité_ all bloody day.” He rolled his shoulders, leaning back in his seat. “Believe me, angel. Even terror gets boring after a while.”

“Did you, this time?”

“Hm?”

“Make up something funny?”

“Oh. Um… I told her the truth.” He looked away, suppressing a laugh. “I told her you owed me for saving you.”

“ _You didn’t,_ ” Aziraphale asked, shocked. “You told me earlier that—”

“I told her I saved you from a dreadful haircut,” Crowley said through a tight grin.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes as he waited for his friend to finish drinking and set his glass down. The fiend was earning a winding-up, but Crowley had been right. The wine really was good, and he didn’t want it spilled.

“You have, you know,” he began mildly.

“I’ve what?”

“Robbed me.”

Crowley groaned. “You’re not still on about that time in ‘34, are you? How the Heaven was I supposed to know it was your coach?”

Aziraphale felt his lip twitch as he suppressed a smile. “Well, you must have recognized me by the time you were close enough to have me at pistol-point. I distinctly remember you telling me to _stand and deliver_.”

“You know I wouldn’t have actually shot you,” Crowley said, flippant, but Aziraphale could hear a note of something else, something brittle behind his words. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I know that,” Aziraphale answered, then took his time with another bite of his food. “I also know how you get when you’re in a _role_.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I think you just got a bit caught up playing highwayman, is all.”

“Really now,” he drawled.

“The Black Knight. Your little… _flirtation_ … with piracy. Your tulip smuggling ring.” Aziraphale counted them on his fingers. “I’m just saying there’s a pattern.”

“How many times have you been the same priest or scholar in a different outfit?” Crowley asked, steepling his own fingers. “Because personally, I’ve lost count, and I’d bet you have too.”

“That is fair. I do like setting up somewhere comfortable, and access to reading material is always appreciated. But you…” Aziraphale dabbed at his lips with a napkin. “You thrive on a dramatic entrance, and you love any excuse you can take to get dressed up.”

Aziraphale did not mention that he also tended to enjoy Crowley’s excuses to get dressed up, or at least the end result. The memory of him charging in off the moors on the back of a stallion with hooves that sparked where they struck, his eyes flashing in the shadow of the brim of his tricorn… needless to say, it had made quite the impression.

“Says the idiot who nearly died because he couldn’t resist wearing his new pumps out across the channel,” Crowley sniped.

“Oh, you noticed those? I quite liked them. I’ll have to get another pair when I return back to London.” Aziraphale delicately cut himself another bite. “I was simply commenting on the fact that the good lady wasn’t entirely inaccurate in her assessment of your criminal background.”

“It was for work, angel, you know that. Special assignment from R&D. I couldn’t exactly say, _actually, boys, never mind, let’s catch the next one,_ ” Crowley grumbled into his cup. “I hope you're not about to tell me you're still cross about that. It's been sixty years, and I gave everything back the next day over breakfast.”

“No, it's just...” Aziraphale looked away, biting his lip. “I had a question about it.”

“Yeah?”

“Given your history with them, I wanted to know how the devil you stayed on your horse riding like that.”

Crowley snorted. “Oh, sure, mock me. The cruelty of angels knows no bounds.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“That wasn’t a horse,” he returned with a grimace. “Looked like one, but that thing had about as much in common with a horse as a Hellhound does with a schnauzer. Lower-downs told me to take one upstairs for a test drive.”

Aziraphale blinked. “I would think that would make it more difficult to stay on, not less.”

“I may have also used a discreet infernal miracle to glue myself to the saddle.”

The peal of laughter that escaped before Aziraphale could stop it was loud enough to get the women by the bar to pause their card game and look over at their table. Crowley sneered at them, and they returned to ignoring the two strange customers in the corner. 

When their glasses were empty and all that remained on Aziraphale’s plate was a smear of preserve, there came a moment that seemed to stretch on for an age. He hadn’t noticed when the tension had crept in again, hadn’t seen the switch in his companion from their earlier familiarity into this forced pretense of ease. Crowley was playing with his wineglass, running his fingertips around the rim in featherlight circles like he was trying to coax out a note from the dry glass. It was almost like a misdirection, the movement drawing the eye away from his other hand, clenched so tight around the stem that his knuckles looked white.

“You know,” Aziraphale said, his voice level. “I don’t think I’ve had enough to drink yet, given the day I’ve had.”

He hadn’t noticed Crowley had been holding his breath, either, until he exhaled. His shoulders, which had been hunched up nearly to his ears, sagged back down again. “I can call her back, order another bottle or two.”

“I was thinking I might want to get quite a bit more drunk.” Aziraphale leaned in, conspiratorially, and before he could stop himself, added, “You said you lived in the neighborhood?”

Crowley’s face did something complex, and the sound he made was choked off and quiet. “I—yeah, I do. Rented a room. It’s not a—it’s. We can go somewhere else. If you like.”

“I think I’d like to go somewhere that’s quiet.”

“Oh.”

“But only if you’re amenable.”

As it turned out, Crowley was quite amenable to that idea, enough to let Aziraphale pay the bill with minimal fuss.

Once again, he lead the way to their destination, this time in much better spirits, gesturing to different places in the neighborhood with one of the wine bottles he was holding by the neck and explaining what changes had happened here in the past months of the revolution. Aziraphale wished he could listen better, but he was expending all of his effort following in a mostly straight line and not dropping his own pair of wine bottles.

The sun had come out in the afternoon, the autumn sky clear and bright overhead. What leaves that were left on the trees were vibrant and golden, and the windmills up on the hill were pleasing to the eye. It was a beautiful day, and Aziraphale should have been paying attention, but all he could look at was the sway of Crowley’s hips as he directed them towards the run-down rooming house where he was staying.

The room itself was shabby and bare, with not even a rug to cover the scuffed floorboards. It was cramped with a washstand in one corner, the narrow bed in the other, and a simple wooden chair between them against the wall under the window. There was very little in it to suggest it had been lived in other than a few stray papers and an inkwell on the small table beside the bed. With a lazy wave of Crowley’s hand, those tucked themselves away into a drawer, and the shutters outside the window closed and latched.

“Here it is,” Crowley said, strolling into his lodgings with his arms spread as if he were giving some grand tour. “Perfect little hidey hole for some revolutionary arsehole.”

Aziraphale followed him inside, shutting the door behind them. There was a pulse of infernal power as it latched by more means than just the mortal. With the exit sealed and the window blocked, he became acutely aware of the press of the walls around them, of how little space there was in the room. It should have been alarming, but it wasn’t. It was _exhilarating_. Even the question of where to sit had his heart beating just a touch faster—there was only the one chair, which meant the bed was the only other place one could reasonably be expected to go. The image of Crowley this morning, lounging against an alcove in the cell like the portrait of some rakish seducer, came to mind again, this time transposed onto that bed… and to Aziraphale’s credit, he did not give himself away by blushing.

With a faint huff and a movement more like a collapse than anything else, Crowley put an end to Aziraphale’s silent musing about the seating drama by sliding to the floor in an inelegant sprawl, his back braced against the side of the bed.

“Go on, then,” he said, gesturing to the chair with a heavy gesture, wine sloshing against the glass as the neck of the bottle swayed in his grasp.

Aziraphale obeyed, and then they both set about racing to the bottom of their bottles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Context for those of you who want to read this without reading [the previous installment](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21922903) first:  
> During a visit to Stockholm, Crowley and Aziraphale gave in (briefly) to their mutual desire and had sex, Crowley nearly froze to ~~death~~ discorporation, and before they could talk about any of that, Aziraphale was reassigned to London to set up a new base of operations for Heaven.
> 
> **Historical Note:** The part of Paris where Crowley is staying is near Montmartre Hill. Its name was modified from the Latin for "Mount of Mars" during Roman occupation. During the revolution, the area was renamed in honor of Jean-Paul Marat, a revolutionary assassinated earlier in the year in 1793. The area would later attract a community of artists, writers, and free-thinkers.
> 
> What Crowley didn't realize when he was being dumb and panicky was that he was doomed from the start. No matter what happens in his pants, the brain is the most important sex organ.


	2. Lamplight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale made the mistake of letting the wine and friendly company relax him. He made the mistake of forgetting just how much Crowley could hear when he wanted to really listen, just how much he could see when he turned those amber eyes on an angel most practiced at lying to people who didn’t care enough to doubt him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Note:** heads up for some general "using alcohol to not deal with your problems" nonsense as well as drunken snogging. The sex next chapter (my bad y'all, had to push it back) will be 100% sober.

They drank, and they talked, and they laughed, and in some ways, it was like they had never been parted. He wouldn’t presume to speak for Crowley’s feelings on the matter, but for Aziraphale the relief of simply being here like this was like a long overdue exhale. Although they had spent much longer stretches alone in the past—centuries, sometimes, in the beginning—Aziraphale had felt this last separation more acutely than he had many of the others.

The hours slipped away from them until the sun had set and the only light in the room came from an oil lantern Crowley had produced and set up on the sill. The shadows it cast were long and deep, deep enough to get lost in. More than once Aziraphale found himself distracted by their movement, by the play of their own shadows against the opposite wall, especially the slender shapes cast by Crowley's hands as he gestured while telling a story.

Crowley’s hands were still now and had been for the last several minutes. He was quiet, contemplative… not that Aziraphale really noticed, of course. They had established a pattern over the centuries of an ebb and flow in such intoxicated conversations. It didn't feel strange, this lull, just more of the same. Familiar.

Somehow in all of this, and he couldn't quite remember how or when, Aziraphale had ended up sitting on the floor. Beside him, still sitting against the bed, Crowley was a ball of angles. Long legs tucked up against his body, knees propping up his chin, arms wrapped around his stockinged shins. It was a departure from his friend’s earlier sprawl, and Aziraphale found himself with the strange urge to pull the blanket off the bed and down around Crowley’s shoulders. He didn’t, of course. He kept his hands to himself.

It had been a pleasant if somewhat mindless conversation up to that point. Complaints about the chilly weather, both here and across the channel. A description of a bakery Aziraphale had tried that Crowley should visit the next time he was in London. An anecdote about Aziraphale’s new tailor. Something stupid one of Crowley’s coworkers had said. A rant about how the light in this place wasn’t good enough for indoor gardening, how Crowley hadn’t been sent somewhere with decent light for years. A manuscript Aziraphale was interested in. Back and forth, trivial topics, all safe. Comfortable. All things he had missed in these long years apart.

When it came to his higher-ups, and even God Herself, Aziraphale had grown used to talking without being listened to, to being watched without being seen. He would of course deny that to anyone who asked. He denied it even to himself. The trouble, though, with hearing again and again that you are unimportant and unworthy of notice is that over time you will come to believe it.

Aziraphale made the mistake of letting the wine and friendly company relax him. He made the mistake of forgetting just how much Crowley could hear when he wanted to really listen, just how much he could see when he turned those amber eyes on an angel most practiced at lying to people who didn’t care enough to doubt him.

“Why d'you keep touchin' your arm like that?” Crowley slurred, gazing over the tops of his sunglasses as he dipped his head to tuck his chin to his chest. The yellow of his eyes was piercing in the dim light, and at first Aziraphale could focus on nothing else.

Aziraphale blinked as he processed Crowley's words. He dropped both his hands to his lap once he realized what he'd been asked, noticed the way he'd been rubbing at the bruised and broken skin on his wrists without being aware that he was doing it.

“Nothing,” he said, the word tumbling out of his mouth in a rush as if that would make up for his delay, as if saying it quickly would make it more believable.

“You've been doin' it all day, 'ziraphale.”

“Nervous habit," Aziraphale supplied, plastering on a grin.

Crowley tilted his head, a slight sway to the movement. “Are you nervous?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again, unsure of what to say. There was an answer, a _right_ answer, but right now it felt just ever so slightly out of reach. Aziraphale was sitting here with his—well, they were hereditary enemies, weren’t they? Crowley _was_ a demon. Vigilance was a virtue, or at least that was one of the phrases rattling around in his brain leftover from last month’s briefing Upstairs. It wouldn’t be wrong to be nervous…

But he wasn’t. He hadn’t been nervous around Crowley in a long time.

“I’m—” Aziraphale began, then looked up at the ceiling, looking for the rest of what he meant. “I’m _fine.”_

“Then why’re you still doin’ it?”

He looked down, and sure enough, his hands were worrying at his wrists again. It didn’t hurt, not much, but it had been so long since he’d injured his corporation and been unable to heal it that felt novel. Strange. The instinct was there to touch, to soothe, to smooth away the imperfection. He couldn’t, though. Just one more thing he had to do the human way.

“M—this jacket. It doesn’t quite, ah…” Aziraphale tugged the ruffles first, then the cuff of the jacket, pulling them both straight. “The sleeves are tight.”

Before he could pull his hands back, Crowley untangled his arms from around his knees and leaned forward, right into Aziraphale’s space. The side of his face was so near to Aziraphale’s chest he thought for one wild moment that Crowley was trying to listen to his heartbeat, and experienced brief panic at the way he felt it speeding up. The back of his head was _right there,_ so close that Aziraphale was able to watch the few stray hairs that had slipped free of those stiff curls flutter from his own heavy breaths. He was just so near, near enough to _smell_ , nearer than they had been since the last time they were together, the last time Crowley had let him—

Crowley sat up, but he didn’t move away. His face was close enough that Aziraphale could see the faint shadow of stubble on his checks even in the dim lamplight. Close enough to touch, to kiss… Aziraphale almost reached for him before noticing the snarl twisting those lips.

“Your wrists,” Crowley said, his voice low. “They’re hurt.”

His first instinct was to deny it, to distract, and to that end he clasped his hands together in an attempt to hide them… but what good would that do? Crowley had already seen the marks. The damage was already done.

“Barely,” he said, trying not to sound too defensive. “Really, Crowley, I don’t see why—just a scrape. From the, ah…” Aziraphale closed his fists and held his arms together in his lap, searching for the word through the haze of alcohol in his mind. “From this morning. With the chains.”

“Lemme see.”

Aziraphale moved his hands away in protest. “No,” he said, laughing. “Really, you’re… s’not even a problem.”

“You keep messsssing with it.”

He tried to ignore that there was emotion in that voice, tried to ignore the way the word stretched into a hiss, what that meant…

“I don’t see why it matters to you, the way I—”

“Miracle it.”

He blinked at the interruption. “What?”

Crowley rocked back to settle his weight on his heels. “I said, _miracle it._ D’your…” He wiggled his fingers. “Your thing. Heal it.”

“You’re being ridiclu—ridiculous.”

“And you’re tryin’ to dodge m’question.”

“I am a warrior of God Herself, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, aiming for something like a scold. He pronounced each word with as much clarity as he was capable of at this level of inebriation. “I have—I guarded the gate of Eden, I fought in— _I can handle a sore wrist.”_

Crowley clicked his tongue. “Alright then, O Warrior of the Lord. Show us a miracle.”

The trouble wasn’t that he couldn’t. The power was there, right at the tips of his fingers. He could draw upon it for this and a million other trivial things besides, use it to shape the fabric of the reality around him to his will. It was _easy._

But he was so, _so_ close… or he hoped he was, at least. At times it seemed like there was little chance he’d actually be allowed to have what he wanted, that he was asking for too much and was foolish to have asked at all. It was a bit like he was being made to run a race with a finish line that was hidden from him, and all the hurdles along the way hidden, too. Every time he spoke to Gabriel the parameters seemed to have changed, and he didn’t know if he was struggling to keep up with what Heaven wanted or if he simply wasn’t being told.

It wasn’t like he’d gone completely without his powers ever since receiving that first reprimand, of course. Sometimes he deemed a miracle to be connected enough to his work that it couldn’t possibly be something the others would be angry about. Other times he found a way to justify to himself why it was alright, and after rehearsing the justification enough times that it stuck in his mind, he let himself perform the miracle. Most of the times, though, he simply forgot he was supposed to be conserving them.

Any one miracle could be the one that tipped the scales out of his favor for good. Whenever he considered taking the easy route for something, he instead thought of his bookshop—well, _the_ bookshop. The idea of it, really, since it didn’t yet exist. A space of his own. A space for his books and all the little trinkets he had accumulated over millennia. He had caches of them scattered all over the world, stored away under the ownership of various pseudonyms. Spread out. Dozens of small, modest collections that would hardly attract attention. It was safer that way. It didn’t carry the appearance of greed, of becoming too attached to the material world… but it also meant he ran into the frequent problem of discovering that the book he wanted to read was squirreled away on another continent.

What was a little temporary discomfort when weighed against a future where he could be as comfortable as he liked? A place of his own, a permanent place, a place he could shape over time without ever having to worry about being told to abandon it for a mission on the other side of the world. What miracle was worth it when weighed against a future where he could have a patch of this Earth that he got to keep? A little soreness was nothing compared to the picture in his mind of bookshelves out in the open, his collection on display instead of hidden from view. A writing desk by a window, looking out onto the same street every time he wanted to watch the humans. A chair to sit in at night to read that would shape to his body over time until it fit him as well as he fit into his new life. What was a bruise when weighed against the promise of a well-worn sofa in a back room? What scrape was worth losing the chance for a flat upstairs with a fireplace and a feather mattress wide enough for two?

Crowley, meanwhile, seemed to have been disturbed by Aziraphale’s lack of a response. He had clearly been bothered earlier, but he offered up his concern to Aziraphale, like he so often did, under a layer of mockery, of sarcasm without teeth. There was no trace of that left in his expression now.

“Would you have really done it?” Crowley asked, breathless and brittle.

“What are you talking about?”

“Were you gonna let them ki—dissscor… _Fuck it all, y’know what I mean.”_ He cut himself off as his hiss returned. He groped around beside himself for the wine, nearly knocking it over in his apparent unwillingness to look away to find it. After taking a drink straight from the bottle and swallowing with a grimace, he continued. “Were you going to let them chop off your bloody head?”

“You’re… Don’t be silly, Crowley.”

The demon lowered himself all the way back onto the ground, settling heavily onto his backside like he was worn down by some weight he carried.

“I don’t believe it,” he said, his voice flat. “You were. You would have let them do it.”

_No, of course not,_ Aziraphale thought to himself.

He was clever. He knew he was clever. He had nearly six thousand years more life experience than any human at the prison or at the foot of the guillotine. It wouldn’t have even taken a miracle. If he had thought, _really thought,_ that he was in real danger, he could have gotten out of there on his own. He didn’t _need_ Crowley to come and save him any more than he _needed_ Heaven to have intervened on his behalf.

“D’you think I’m an idiot, Crowley?” Aziraphale grumbled, retrieving the wine bottle from the demon’s loose grip and pouring himself a fresh glass. He only spilled a little of it on his trousers.

“Yes.” Crowley stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “No. But you can act like it.”

Those curls he had given himself barely jostled as his head moved and Aziraphale’s fingers itched to tear them down, to let him see that red hair loose and long. Instead, he set the bottle back down between them and twisted his own hands together in his lap. If he’d been more sober, he might have been annoyed enough to quip back, to start an argument just for the sake of having one. Tonight’s drunkenness had veered in a somewhat emotional direction, though, and all he could do was lean his head back on the chair he was sitting against and sigh.

“I know.”

Crowley made some stifled sound, like he had started trying to say something, but by the time Aziraphale had turned his head to look over at him he was concentrating very hard on peeling the label off of the wine bottle. Aziraphale looked back up at the ceiling, and by the time Crowley spoke again enough time had passed that he had begun to think the demon had dropped the issue.

“Just... can y’tell me m’wrong?” Crowley slurred. “Wanna be wrong, ‘ziraphale.”

“I’m sorry?”

Crowley was gesturing at him with the wine bottle, his forehead scrunched up as he focused on trying to ask his slow, choppy question. “Can you tell me that you would’ve gotten out if I hadn't—that you weren't gonna do somethin’ stupid like sit there and let ‘em do it?”

For just a moment, Aziraphale considered sobering up and leaving. He did _not_ want to try to explain this all. It touched on too many things he couldn’t say, not to Crowley or anyone else. This was a dangerous conversation to be having, and Aziraphale had to fight back the urge to run.

But Crowley had risked his own safety this morning, far more than Aziraphale himself had. Worse things would have awaited him than the guillotine if he’d been caught. Perhaps Aziraphale could find a way to tell him part of it. He owed him that much, at least. And he wasn’t eager to bring the night to an end just yet. Crowley was such good company, and it had been such a long time…

“Fine,” Aziraphale said.

“Fine?”

“But,” he continued, ignoring the little voice in his mind that told him he would regret saying anything more, “I want to ask you a question, too.”

“Yeah. 'Course.”

Aziraphale took a deep breath. It would be hard doing this drunk, saying everything he needed to say and dodging the things he couldn’t, but he feared it would be even harder sober.

“You saved me a gr—well, a fair amount of, ah. Definitely, um... inconvenience,” Aziraphale said, acutely aware of how much he was moving his hands as he spoke. “And I don't want you to get the idea that I don't... that I'm ungrateful. It was jolly—oh, that is to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see you.”

“…But?” Crowley asked.

“But my side, they... well. I mentioned the fuss Gabriel got up to over my miracles. I can't imagine they'd be happy with me if I came back without a body. Can’t have that.” He chuckled and hoped it didn’t sound as hollow as it felt. “So, you see... there was really no danger. Just humans. Even still, I'm... it was helpful, ah. Having the help.”

He smiled at Crowley, though of course the demon didn’t smile back. He so rarely did.

“Right. Yeah. So, you would’ve saved yourssself, ‘cause it’s… what?” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “It’s against the rules?”

Aziraphale gave a weak shrug. “Definitely frowned upon.”

“They'd be upset you got your head cut off because you got one of their corporations messssed up.” Crowley’s voice was flat, each syllable ground out with a precision that bordered on harshness. “‘Cause they own it. Your body.”

“Precisely.” Aziraphale nodded, then looked away. Chose only to hear part of the meaning in Crowley’s words. They were accurate, at least. He had long assumed that there must be a similar process in Hell, and he was glad to know that Crowley understood, glad that he didn't have to explain in further detail the fear that if he were sent Upstairs without a body, he might not be allowed back down.

Besides, that was to say nothing of the questions that would have surely been asked about why he had been discorporated in _Paris_ of all places. Even if anyone had noticed he was in need of help, it would have been a rather compromising situation to be caught in, and he should be—no, he _was_ grateful to have been left on his own to sort it out.

Except, of course, he hadn’t been left on his own. Not really.

He had suspected Crowley was likely to be in the area, but Aziraphale knew he was a busy demon. It would have been ridiculous to expect him to abandon whatever mischief he was working on just to get Aziraphale out of trouble, and so Aziraphale hadn’t let himself dwell on that silly fantasy in the darkness of his cell.

And yet… and _yet_... Unasked, without any expectation of thanks or repayment, Crowley had turned up when Aziraphale had needed him most. Had, by his own admission, risked Hell’s wrath to unlock his chains and take him back out into the light.

Aziraphale looked back over at Crowley again, taking in the full sight of him. The light from the oil lamp looked like it was designed specifically to make the demon look good, to shine copper against his hair and highlight the sharpness of his cheekbones. The way his long fingers gripped the dark glass of the bottle. His throat, too, that peek of pale skin that showed above his collar when he tilted his head back to take a long, deep drink. Aziraphale couldn’t help but swallow as well, his mouth dry and wanting. Crowley was sitting mostly cross-legged now, with his right bent at an angle so he might use his knee as an elbow rest. He had not, Aziraphale noticed, retreated all the way back to where he’d started the evening with his back against the side of the bed. Aziraphale also noticed that if one of them were to shift only a few inches, their feet might touch.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale began, and Heaven help him, he sounded so hoarse.

“Mmm?”

He set the bottle down hard against the floorboards, and Aziraphale heard the wine sloshing against the sides. His whole body was tense, from the hard line of his mouth to the way his knuckles went white where he was clutching the neck of the bottle. Aziraphale knew he was frustrated, maybe even angry, yet he wasn’t afraid. He knew Crowley wasn’t upset at _him_. The idea that Crowley might be upset _for him_ , on his behalf… it unsettled him, made him feel things he didn’t quite know the words for.

There was something hot twisting in his stomach, something he wished he could blame on the wine. Perhaps he could, still. Perhaps he could imagine that if they were sober and the lamplight was less flattering, he would be in better control of himself.

Unlikely. Aziraphale had been—they had _both_ been completely clear-headed last winter. When they kissed, when Crowley laid his head back onto Aziraphale’s shoulder and came apart on his fingers.

Aziraphale shook his head. The room felt altogether too hot, felt like it was swaying beneath him. Closing his eyes didn’t help, so he stared at his own hands where they were clinging to the rough-spun fabric of his trousers over his thighs. He needed to focus. He felt like he was just on the edge of something, like he was so close to understanding the shape of this thing he could barely describe, but he was missing one key piece.

He cleared his throat and tried again. “Why did you save me?”

Crowley’s mouth opened, soundless, and snapped closed again. When he spoke, his voice was strained and rough. “You... you know the answer to that.”

“I don't know that I do.” Aziraphale thought he might, he _hoped_ , but he wanted to hear it from Crowley. Wanted to drink it from his lips like wine.

“It's...” He trailed off, looking everywhere but at Aziraphale. His hands clutched the bottle like a lifeline. “ _C'mon._ I… It's nothing.”

“It's not nothing. It's...” The words were there, burning at the back of his throat, behind his eyes, but he couldn't do a thing to release them.

For all the books that he read, Aziraphale had never been good with his own words, with finding ways to say what he needed with any precision. What's worse, there were words that he simply _couldn't_ say, words that were off limits. He felt like he was trying to write with an alphabet that had half its letters stolen. He couldn't thank Crowley, he couldn't point out the virtue in his actions—this time, or the million times before it. He couldn't speak of their Arrangement above a whisper, and the word _friend_ still caught in his throat sometimes. _Love_ , too, was a thing he swallowed. Had, since even before he knew what it was. He had only known it by the burn of it, the lingering taste on his teeth, and it had taken him centuries to decide if it was poison or bitter medicine.

“It's not _nothing_ , Crowley,” he repeated, like that was all he had to say on the matter.

_It's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for me._

Aziraphale did not remember making the conscious decision to lean forwards, to shift his weight onto his hip and drape himself up the length of Crowley’s thigh. He didn’t remember deciding to throw an arm around Crowley’s wiry shoulder and pull him in close. All he knew was the taste of the wine in the breath that they shared, the scrape of stubble against his chin… the way their noses fit next to each other as Crowley turned his head to meet the kiss. The soft, desperate sound that one of them made as Crowley’s lips parted and Aziraphale licked into the heat of his mouth.

He slipped his hand around to the back of Crowley’s neck, careful to not get his fingers tangled in the demon’s hair where he’d tied it back. He marveled that Crowley allowed him to do this, to reach out and touch that vulnerable column of his spine, to let Aziraphale feel the pulse quickening beneath his fingertips. Crowley moaned into his mouth at the touch, and Aziraphale found that the distance between them was quite suddenly impermissible. He moved his legs to straddle one of Crowley’s thighs, brought his other hand to the small of his back to support him as he pressed their chests together.

There was a thump somewhere beside them, the sound of the bottle rolling away towards the bed. Then, Crowley’s hands were on Aziraphale’s sides, his touches light and fluttering like he couldn’t decide where to put them. One of them snaked up between their bodies, fingers twitching like they wanted to grab a fistful of Aziraphale’s shirt. The palm pressed flat against his sternum… and pushed.

Aziraphale broke the kiss and leaned back, grinning in spite of himself. Beneath him, Crowley was breathing hard, his face red and his lips kiss-bitten and shining. Those little glasses of his were askew, enough that Aziraphale could see one of his eyes—gold all the way through, slit pupil focused on him and him alone—and he felt a dizzying swell of affection rise in him that made him grateful he was already on his knees. Crowley raised a trembling hand to the eyepiece, and for a moment Aziraphale was sure he was going to take them off, cast them aside, let him see the eyes he’d dreamed about for so long.

Instead, Crowley straightened his glasses and swallowed.

“Sober up,” he said, his voice shaking.

“I—what?”

“You’re drunk. _Sober up.”_ He sounded firmer this time, surer.

Part of Aziraphale thought to complain, to argue that he could make his own choices, no matter how much he’d had to drink. He knew though, even in his wine-soaked thoughts, that this wasn’t just about what he wanted. Aziraphale took the hand that had been holding Crowley’s neck, still draped over the demon’s shoulder, and snapped his fingers. The evening’s wine flowed out of his system in a surge faster even than his own heartbeat, whisking away the comfortable fuzziness he’d been drifting in and leaving behind only a fuzziness on his tongue.

From the grimace on Crowley’s face, Aziraphale could tell that he must have sobered up, too. He raised a tentative hand to cup Crowley’s cheek and pulled back when he felt him startle at the touch. Crowley moved to stop him, to hold Aziraphale’s fingers back against his skin.

“Can I kiss you again?” Aziraphale asked.

_“Fuck,”_ Crowley groaned, then leaned forward to put his hands in Aziraphale’s hair and kiss him hard and deep. There was no less urgency now that they were no longer inebriated, no less enthusiasm, but there _was_ a great deal more coordination.

“ _If you want._ ” Aziraphale whispered the words into his mouth as they pulled apart to breathe, as one slick strand of saliva stretched between their lips and broke. He thrilled at the way Crowley keened in response, felt the heat of it licking deep in his belly like the first ember of a bonfire.

“If you—if we’re going to—” Crowley panted, then cut himself off with an exasperated, wordless sound. “Just… give me those.”

He took both of Aziraphale’s hands in his, the movement sharp and hesitant, then pushed back the lacy cuffs to expose the raw skin beneath. Crowley sucked in a breath through his teeth at the sight of it.

“Satan’s sake, angel.”

Aziraphale wanted to tell him to stop fussing, to kiss him until he forgot all this nonsense. He wanted to protest, to tell Crowley that it was only a tiny thing, to remind him there were far more serious injuries out there, burns and broken bones and wounds left to fester, but he held his tongue. He’d seen worse, of course. Crowley, too. It was just that… well, it was hard to remember pain and suffering when Crowley was warm between his thighs. When he was holding his hands so gently in his own, thumbs rubbing so softly over tender, angry skin, so careful to avoid the swell of his joints where he was bruised. It was hard to remember to breathe, too.

Slowly, giving him time to pull away or object, Crowley raised Aziraphale’s right hand to his lips. The kiss was a quick, uncertain thing, just a press of dry lips to sore skin, but Aziraphale gasped as he felt it. It left a lingering heat behind it, a charge, and a tingling feeling not unlike champagne bubbles that seemed to sink through his skin and into his very bones. There was a tang in the air, a feeling of infernal power that made the hair on the back of his neck prickle.

He took his hand back, turned it over to look at his wrist from every angle. It certainly never felt like _that_ when he healed himself, yet… the demonic miracle had worked just as well as his own magic. The skin was no longer red and chafed, the bruises had all faded, and there was no more discomfort.

While Aziraphale was distracted, Crowley took the chance to kiss his other wrist. He didn’t gasp this time when he felt it, just looked up from his hand to the lips that had healed him. As the last of the buzz faded from his skin, the miracle dancing around his pulse point before diffusing into the heat of his body, Aziraphale put his hands on Crowley’s shoulders and gently guided them both down to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For AlmondCreamTea and CynSyn in particular. I hope this can provide the good kind of distraction for at least a few minutes.


	3. Effortless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He'd wanted, ever since their frantic, interrupted first time together, for their next encounter to be slow and exploratory. The speed and clumsiness with which Crowley was attempting to divest himself of his breeches, however, reminded Aziraphale that their time together was brief. Would always be brief, would always be a secret stolen away from the rest of their lives. He wasn’t even supposed to be here, in Paris, and he needed to get back before his absence was noticed. He wanted to savor every second, but he also knew that he could not afford to linger because each second could be their last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! I'm back, and I brought a _lot_ of porn. Please note that some of the tags have changed/been added to, including some about the ending of this fic.
> 
>  **Content Note:** All the sex between these two is both loving and enthusiastically consenting... but it's also emotionally complicated and made tricky by assumptions and less than stellar communication. Aziraphale is still struggling with his self-worth re: Heaven, and Crowley's terrified of rejection. Expect mild angst and miscommunication even with lots of consent checking. Also, I did tag this “individual sex acts to be listed in the chapter notes,” so:
> 
> Anal fingering, oral sex, service top Aziraphale, sex before making the Effort, brief fantasies about rougher sex, unintentional facial. Aziraphale has a penis the whole chapter (for now) and Crowley will eventually have a penis (once he gets his life together). Crowley’s the one being seen to here, but they’re switches throughout this series, and Crowley will get his service topportunity next chapter.

Aziraphale held Crowley’s face between his hands and placed a string of kisses, open-mouthed and heavy, up the long line of the demon’s neck. Crowley, for his part, was breathing in shallow pants and moving beneath him—squirming, really—to the point that Aziraphale wanted to wrap him up in his arms and hold him safe and still.

He wanted to do a great deal more than hold him if Crowley was willing. He’d wanted him since this morning, desperately and acutely, since he had first seen him draped against the wall of his cell like temptation made flesh. Crowley looked like that sometimes in the fantasies that kept him company on long, lonely nights—confident and rakish and just the slightest bit dangerous, even though he wasn’t, really, never to Aziraphale—and even the silly hair hadn’t been enough to stop his imagination from wandering. Crowley had come to him, _saved him,_ looked at him like something worth being saved, and there had been a part of him that wanted to prove Crowley right. To make it worth the risk, the trouble, the time. To make _him_ feel like he was worth it.

This morning, he’d mourned the loss of his clothing, and even now felt another twinge of regret at the thought of his new pumps—probably at the bottom of some corpse pit by now, soaked straight through the satin with blood and all other manner of filth—but losing something was different than giving it up by choice. If he thought he could have gotten away with it, he would have dropped to his hands and knees right in that very cell, no matter the grime and the roughness of the stone, and taken whatever Crowley was willing to give him. He would have ruined his stockings and torn the knees right out of his breeches and would have been glad for it.

Whether for safety or for cowardice, he’d kept those thoughts to himself. He didn’t have to any longer.

“Tell me, Crowley,” Aziraphale murmured into the skin beneath his jaw, punctuated with a press of lips. Crowley answered with a sound that was all vowels, sharp and stretched into the shape of a question. “All that time we spent at the café, and you didn’t eat a thing,” he continued between kisses, his tone low and teasing. “And before you say it, no, wine doesn’t count.”

Crowley closed his mouth at that. His reply, when it came, was wrapped around a sharp inhale. “Was—wasn’t hungry.”

Another pair of kisses, bookending a quick little graze of teeth. Nothing hard enough to bruise, of course. They couldn’t leave tonight marked. “Well, I hardly think that’s fair.”

“I don’t— _ah_ —”

“Come now. I took you out to lunch, but that wasn’t what you wanted. Surely there’s something else I can do for you to make it up to you?” Aziraphale purred, letting his hands wander, letting a fingertip slide up the length of Crowley’s thigh. “You don’t want me saying _thank you_ … but would you let me show you?”

The demon’s legs shifted beneath him, leaning into the touch of his hand, and then stilled. Tensed. “This isn’t—you don’t have to…” He trailed off into an unintelligible sound, a frown tugging down his brow and stretching his lips into a crooked line. “You know that you don’t… that you don’t owe me. For this—for anything. You do know that, right?”

 _Oh._ Yes, of course. Crowley had told him not to talk about it. Told him not to call it what it was. A rescue, an act of kindness. Heroics. It was the kind of thing that wasn’t safe to bring up, not even here.

“I know,” Aziraphale whispered, giving Crowley a furtive sort of smile before kissing the corner of his mouth.

Crowley turned his head and kissed him back, his tongue probing softly at Aziraphale’s lips until he opened his mouth to let him in. His hands wrapped around Aziraphale’s back while Aziraphale’s crept up to pluck at the loose knot of the demon’s cravat. He only broke their kiss once he’d pulled it free to reveal a tantalizing vee of bare skin at his open collar and could set to work peppering the hollow of Crowley’s throat with licks and nips.

“ _Angel,_ ” Crowley gasped, his hands fisting in Aziraphale’s coat. Aziraphale hummed against his skin in response. “ _Angel?_ ”

The second time it was clearer, questioning, and Aziraphale raised his head to listen.

“An—have you…” he cut himself off, breathing hard and tilting his head back.

At this angle, Aziraphale could barely peek beneath the lenses of his glasses to see that his eyes were closed. He wanted to reach for them, or to ask Crowley to take them off, but he held himself back. He hadn’t seen Crowley without them in centuries, and he couldn’t have failed to notice the way the demon scrambled to right them whenever they were out of place. It had to be Crowley’s choice, to leave them on or to show Aziraphale his wheat-field eyes, and Aziraphale knew well what happened every time he requested something of the demon. Crowley was terrible at telling him “no,” and Aziraphale didn't want this— _any_ of this, the glasses or anything else that might follow—to be something he agreed to just to try to please him.

“Have I what?” Aziraphale prompted, stroking his thumb along the ridge of Crowley’s cheekbone, feeling the warmth of them. The most becoming flush was painting his cheeks and the tops of his ears.

Crowley took a deep breath. “Have you… thought about this?”

Aziraphale closed his eyes, exhaled, bent his neck to press their foreheads together. In that tender space between them, where their breath mingled hot and humid, he made his confession. “My dear… I’ve found myself quite unable to stop.”

There was a hand against the side of his face then, pulling him closer even as Crowley tilted his chin to meet him in a fierce kiss.

Aziraphale hadn’t been lying. In the past year and a half, in the moments between errands from Heaven and his meetings Upstairs, Aziraphale had found himself with plenty of time to think. Time to dwell on the last time he’d seen Crowley, to imagine what might happen the next time they met. Time to list the ways it would need to be different than what they’d done in Stockholm and the ways he longed for it to be the same. Almighty forgive him, how he had thought about it. They’d had only a handful of stolen minutes, over too quickly by far, but it had been enough to make an impact.

Memories of the demon in his arms, warm and pliant and _real,_ filled his head in the evenings they’d been apart, when all had been quiet and still. The terror, too, of course, came back just as frequently, the recognition of just how very close they’d been to being caught… but no bolt from Heaven had arrived to smite them. Hell hadn’t opened up beneath Crowley’s feet to drag him away, and he hadn’t heard the voice of God in his ear—silence millennia-long undone—telling him he’d failed.

For months, he’d run the problem of it around in his mind again and again, like a snarl in a ball of twine he was trying to pick apart with shaking, stiff fingers. The first knot he’d managed to untangle had been the nagging question of whether what they’d done could be called a sin. He didn’t often like to ask himself that question. It sounded too much like Gabriel’s voice did the first time he’d heard that Aziraphale had taken an interest in food. He didn’t eat olives for a century after that, not until they stopped tasting like ash in his mouth. Not until he and Crowley had gotten drunk in that little tavern that served _epityrum_. The last time he’d had any had been before Petronius had died, and the wine and his nostalgia had gotten the better of him. That night, he’d been able to forget his shame for a few hours. That night, he’d been able to taste the mint and the rue and the tang of the vinegar, and he’d reached for a second helping.

Aziraphale wasn’t human. He didn’t have to wait until the end of a mortal life to learn if his sins outweighed his good deeds, if his actions had damned him and moved him out of Her favor for eternity. Angels who broke the rules Fell. Crowley himself was proof that Her judgement was swift and obvious… and the fact that Aziraphale himself hadn’t Fallen was proof that if their indiscretion had been a sin, it must be one that the Almighty had chosen to ignore.

Sex with a demon—with _Crowley,_ his friend—was surely something their superiors would punish them both for if they were to be caught… but was it any worse than the trading of temptations and blessings they had been doing for the last eight hundred years? Their friendship, the Arrangement… they had already done enough to doom themselves a thousand times over. If any contact between them could be the thing to ruin them, did it really matter what _type_ of contact they had? If they were already risking their lives for theatre tickets and after-dinner drinks… why shouldn’t they simply give in to what they clearly both wanted?

It wasn’t as though he was _defecting_. Heavens, no. Aziraphale’s loyalties remained unchanged as always, his dedication to God and Her Plan unwavering. He knew who he was and where he belonged, and he knew who Crowley was, too. They were an angel and a demon, and there was nothing either of them could do to change that. Someday, it wouldn’t matter that they were friends. The End would come, the War. Armageddon. The notion of “opposite sides” would be a physical reality, a battlefield stretched between them. One of them would be destroyed, if not both, and the best Aziraphale could offer in the way of mercy would be to look for a shock of red hair among the enemy ranks and run the other way.

Aziraphale wasn’t thinking about Armageddon right now, at least not directly. He was thinking of all the time they had before Armageddon—years, centuries, millennia, some unknown number no one but God Herself could count—and how he wanted to keep kissing Crowley until the stars fell and the seas boiled away to salt and steam. He was thinking about the way his tongue felt when it ran along the inside of Crowley’s teeth, and the way the sharpness of them made him shiver. He was thinking about the strand of red hair that had broken loose from the rest in their gentle fall to the floor beside the bed, how he’d moved to brush it away and instead had twisted it between his first two fingers.

Perhaps most immediately, though, Aziraphale was thinking about the way it felt to have the demon’s wiry frame beneath him, to lie above him and straddle him. About how Crowley’s thigh had insinuated itself to press, gently but urgently, between Aziraphale’s own. He found himself almost absentmindedly rocking against it, half-hard already in his trousers, though the friction he found that way did little to satisfy him. All it did was leave him wanting more.

He broke their kiss with a sigh, tucked the strand of hair behind Crowley’s ear, and asked, “What are you in the mood for?”

By way of an answer, Crowley put his tongue back in his own mouth and shut his lips, looking very much like he was a few seconds late to processing the question and was still wondering why the kissing had stopped. Aziraphale felt a swell of amused affection for his own, dear demon.

“I assure you, I’m quite flexible,” he continued, then laughed. “In terms of my preferences, that is. I would assume that you were more likely to be the flexible one out of the two of us, if _these_ are any indication.”

Aziraphale gripped Crowley’s serpentine hips, marveling at the way his thumbs fit into the divots he felt there even through the fabric of his breeches and his oxblood coat. Crowley squirmed under the touch, and Aziraphale filed that information away for later. Was it arousal? Or was it possible that Crowley could actually be ticklish?

Crowley tried to talk then, but for all of Aziraphale’s practice deciphering his almost-words and nonsense syllables, he couldn’t make much sense of it. The demon's tongue, a tripping hazard for the poor dear under even normal circumstances, seemed to choke him entirely during sex. Perhaps giving him the opportunity to communicate nonverbally would be best.

With another little shimmy of his hips, the erection providing what he hoped would be a clear enough sign of interest, Aziraphale pressed his palm against the juncture of Crowley's thighs. To his momentary distress found that he wasn't hard. The thought was banished immediately by a memory of Crowley's last Effort, the sweet slick heat of his quim around his fingers, and Aziraphale was powerless to repress a shudder of pleasure. He dipped his fingers lower, wanting to feel those lips through the fabric of the demon's breeches, and instead found... nothing.

“I'm—I'm not—I was trying...” Crowley stammered from behind the arm flung over his scalding face. He took a deep breath and tried again. “Haven't got anything right now, angel.”

Aziraphale blinked. It seemed to run counter to his impression of the nature of demonic work. He had heard Crowley speak of his infernal quotas before, and he had some vague prior notion that some form of genitalia was a prerequisite for those duties involving lust. Of course, Aziraphale had never performed a seduction when covering a temptation as a part of their Arrangement, but he had always privately assumed that had been because Crowley had kept those particular assignments to himself.

He blinked again, and a third time, and then jerked his hand away as a new, far more serious idea burned away all other lines of thought.

“My dear boy, I—I’m so sorry,” he stammered, trying to crawl backwards off of his friend’s prone form. “I didn’t. What ghastly behavior, rutting like a—like an animal, when you didn’t want—”

“No!” Crowley reached out, frantic yet hesitant, his fingertips fluttering over Aziraphale’s sleeve like he wanted to grab him but feared to. “I mean, yes. I—I want. Fuck, angel. I want. You have no idea.”

Aziraphale watched his face, seeing only his own reflection in those dark lenses. “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he said, in the voice people use when trying to soothe a frightened animal. He settled back to rest on his knees, no longer touching Crowley, but close enough to be touched. “Can you explain it to me, please? I want to understand. I don’t want to… to make a mistake.”

Crowley tilted his head back, his face pointed straight up at the ceiling. “I unmade my Effort this morning because I was trying—I thought you…” He took a breath, a shuddering inhale and a long exhale. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. Was being stupid. It doesn’t matter. I… I want. This. Whatever it is. I want it. If you want it.”

“I want you to enjoy yourself. And if that means going back to our wine, or—or me leaving. Pretending like this didn’t happen…” Aziraphale kept his voice steady, despite the twisting feeling in his belly. “I can do that. Just say the word.”

An awful grimace stretched across Crowley’s face, wide enough that Aziraphale could see the way his teeth were beginning to shift into fangs. His eyes were changed, too. He’d seen just a peek of them earlier, but he’d been too caught up in his own desire to notice the significance of such a thing. This wasn’t good. Crowley always kept such careful control over those serpentine aspects of his corporation, and it only slipped when he was overwhelmed. Stressed. _Di_ stressed.

“Please,” Aziraphale whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Crowley barked out a strange, strained little laugh. “Hurt me? You aren’t going to hurt me. I’m a demon. M’not fragile.”

Privately, Aziraphale begged to differ. He’d seen Crowley hurt more times than he’d ever wanted to, had seen what he looked like hovering on the edge of discorporation, and it wasn’t an image that faded easily. Neither would the memory of what it felt like to touch his skin and find it cold, like he had last winter. To call his name and hear no answer.

The demon could be hurt so, _so_ easily, and Aziraphale knew his own strength. He knew what Crowley’s blood looked like, slick on a blade in the light of early dawn. The picture in his head was as sharp as ever even after two centuries. It had been some foolhardy plan of Crowley’s, a fight done for show, a way of keeping up appearances. Allowed to get out of hand, to go too far. It had been the first and only time Aziraphale had directly caused harm to him. He had promised himself in the sight of God that it wouldn’t happen again.

“Have I…” Crowley began, as the seconds ticked by in silence. “Did I fuck this up?”

“No,” Aziraphale murmured. “Did I?”

Crowley shook his head, hard enough that those ridiculous curls coifed on top of his head jostled. “No. Never. I just… I thought you wouldn’t want to. Um. Again.”

Aziraphale swallowed. They were treading on dangerous ground here, close to things they couldn’t say, lines they couldn’t cross. He felt his own love inside him like a physical thing, a dangerous thing ready to burst forth and ruin them. Some things weren’t allowed, weren’t safe but this… maybe this could be something they could do, a secret they could keep. If they couldn’t have it all, maybe they could take a piece. Show one another what they couldn’t say.

“If you’re…” He cleared his throat. “If you are amenable.”

“I am. Amenable.”

“Well, then.” Aziraphale slowly, tentatively leaned forward again, laying a gentle hand above the demon’s knee. Crowley’s breath hitched, but he shifted his leg to meet the touch. “How should we proceed?”

“I should probably, ah…” Crowley looked down at his own lap, then back up at Aziraphale. His ears were going pink again. “What, ah… what would you like me to… make?”

Aziraphale laughed. “I should say that’s rather up to you.”

“Tell me… tell me how you want me,” he said, his words coming all in a jumble. “Anything. However you—I’ll do it, whatever you want.”

Crowley brought his fingers together, waiting to snap and change his body at Aziraphale’s command, at his whim, and Aziraphale felt a squirm of something like shame stir within him. It felt wrong to have so much trust placed in him, to have that much power given to him. Who was he to make a decision like that? Who was he to ask Crowley to change a single thing about his corporation, to this body he’s made a home in? No. That wouldn’t do at all. Aziraphale reached down and covered Crowley’s hand with his own, threading their fingers together.

“Whatever you like,” he insisted. “Don’t just pick what you think I’ll want. I want you to pick something you’ll enjoy.”

“I—I want this to be…” Crowley took a shuddering breath. “I want this to be good.”

He felt a surge of fondness for the poor demon. Didn’t he know? It would be good because it was him. _Them._ The rest, the what and the how, that was all secondary. A pleasant afterthought.

“It will be. We have any number of options to pick from, no matter what you choose. The humans have come up with so many clever ways to use these bodies, you know,” Aziraphale said, feeling his own confidence surge now that he knew his interest was returned. “We could do what we did last time with my fingers if you wanted to make yourself a quim. Or, I could use my mouth. I could do the same if you wanted a cock. Hands or mouth, either way. You could fuck me, or I could fuck you, if you’d prefer that.”

Crowley stared at him, mouth agape, and for a moment, Aziraphale feared he had broken him. Perhaps it had been a mistake to overwhelm him with suggestions at the beginning. He was feeling something similar, thinking of all the ways he’d ever thought about having sex with Crowley and now having to choose only one, but it seemed as though Crowley had gotten frozen trying to make his decision.

“Oh dear. How about for now, you just tell me how you would like me to touch you? We can start with that, and we can work out any other specifics later.” Crowley nodded. “Good. Now, would you like my hands or my mouth?”

For emphasis, Aziraphale raised a hand and wiggled his fingers. Crowley stared at it and made a noise like he’d swallowed a live goose, but eventually managed to choke out real words.

“Could you…?” He swallowed, and Aziraphale watched his Adam’s apple bob along the column of his throat. “… Your hands?”

Ignoring the tightness of his own breeches at that appealing prospect, Aziraphale smiled, his hand drifting back to where it had been between Crowley’s legs. “Of course. Have you put any more thought toward anatomy? Or positioning, even?”

 _“Fuck,_ I—I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to decide right away. If you wanted, there are things we could do without you having to have made an Effort.”

The demon made a sound, faint and high pitched, and Aziraphale realized a moment later it had been a rather hysterical laugh. “M'pretty sure you need something down there to—if you're going to—” His words seemed to fail him, and he trailed off into a sputter.

Aziraphale squeezed his hand. “I could start touching you, and you could pick something when the fancy strikes you. Would you like that?” Crowley gave a frantic, jerky nod, and hesitantly covered Aziraphale's other hand—the one on his groin—with his own. A question occurred to him, then, since it had been so long since he had gone without an Effort of any kind. “Do you... do you have a prostate, Crowley?”

A twitch of the fingers, a squeeze of both of Aziraphale's hands, and then a ragged, breathless, “Yeah.”

“Would... do you want me to...?” Aziraphale began, trying to decide how to ask without being crude. Crowley answered him without hearing the rest of the question, without even words of his own, as his long fingers began to fumble for the falls of his breeches.

He'd wanted, ever since their frantic, interrupted first time together, for their next encounter to be slow and exploratory. When he’d suggested this, he anticipated that they might return to kissing first, trying some more tentative touches above their clothing to give Crowley enough time to make up his mind. The speed and clumsiness with which Crowley was attempting to divest himself of his breeches, however, reminded Aziraphale that their time together was brief. Would always be brief, would always be a secret stolen away from the rest of their lives. He wasn’t even supposed to be here, in Paris, and he needed to get back before his absence was noticed. He wanted to savor every second, but he also knew that he could not afford to linger because each second could be their last.

 _Right, then,_ he thought, bringing his hands to Crowley's hips to help him with the garment, tugging black linen away to reveal pale skin and hair as red as he’d remembered it from all those years ago. _Quick it shall be._

Watching Crowley’s face for any sign of hesitation, he pressed a thumb to a warm, bare patch of skin above his hipbone. True to what he’d said, his pelvis was completely blank. Even after all these centuries, but Aziraphale still remembered what it had been like before he’d made the Effort for the first time. He’d known desire even back then, before he knew what it was that he wanted. That he even _could_ want.

“What does it feel like?” he asked. “Like this, with no genitalia? Can you still feel… arousal?”

Crowley grit out his answer from between his teeth, acting like it cost him something to say it honestly. “Yeah. I’d—definitely. Yep.”

“Stimulation?”

 _“For fuck’s sake,”_ he hissed. “I’m— _yes._ And I’m not going to be—I’m not planning on _leaving it_ like this. I just—”

While it was a great deal of fun flustering Crowley, Aziraphale decided to have mercy on him. “I know. And I imagine it might, ah. Be easier to make a choice in the moment, as it were.”

“‘Course. Yeah.”

“I think it might be best if—” he said, running a teasing hand through that thatch of copper curls. “Turn around? With your face—yes, there, on the bed?”

Crowley made it almost all of the way onto the bed, practically throwing the top half of himself face-down on the threadbare mattress. He was kneeling at the bedside, a parody of prayer, with his head bowed and his legs spread. Even with nothing between them, the sight left Aziraphale breathless. He was still mostly clothed, and there was no indication that he planned to finish the job any time soon. Other concerns, it would seem, were more pressing. His breeches were still tangled around his ankles, caught up in the mess of his stockings and shoes, and that oxblood coat was flipped up over his back to reveal parts of the demon Aziraphale hadn’t seen since public bathing began to fall out of fashion. The sharp column of his spine and the dimples above his hips. The soft red furring of his upper thighs. The lean muscles of a backside that Aziraphale couldn’t help but want to nip with his teeth.

Aziraphale chuckled under his breath as he peeled off his jacket, glad to be rid of the scratchy thing for the time being. He untied his ruffled jabot as well, his thinking being that he wouldn’t want to torment the poor creature if it did turn out that he was ticklish. After depositing those in the chair under the window, he rolled his sleeves back carefully, tucking all of the lace and flounce behind itself and out of the way. He heard a faint whine and saw Crowley watching him over his shoulder, the sunglasses still in place, but clearly affected. Right, then. The rest of his clothes could wait.

He knelt behind Crowley, straddling one of his legs, careful not to put his weight on the breeches tangled around them. He hesitated only a fraction of a second before he let himself touch a tentative hand to the side of Crowley’s hip, his heart fluttering in his chest at the warmth of it, and at the unsteady breath Crowley took at the sensation.

How many times had he imagined this moment? It had been near constant in the last months, ever since their first little tryst, but he would be lying to himself if he tried to pretend that he hadn’t pictured it so many more times over the centuries. For as long as he had known he could experience desire, Crowley had been there in the edges of his imagination. Red hair, gold eyes, a clever tongue and wicked fingers, pieces of him ever present, even in those days before Aziraphale let himself acknowledge that he wanted him wholly.

Crowley didn’t feel comfortable showing his eyes, and that was fine. Aziraphale hoped that if they kept doing this, this impossible secret thing they seem to be hurtling towards, that maybe someday Crowley would be comfortable enough to share that with him. It had been so long since Crowley had gone without his spectacles around him that Aziraphale could barely remember what those eyes looked like when the demon smiled.

Aziraphale wanted to know the shape of them in his anger and his sorrow, when he was drunk and joyful, when he was working his mischief. Someday he hoped to catalogue each and every look… but at the moment, he was fixated on imagining them dark with pleasure. Until Crowley was ready, though, his imagination would have to be enough.

But perhaps he’d be allowed something else. His eyes grazed over the stiff curls sculpted atop the demon’s head, the bow tying back the ringlets that fell over his back and shoulders. He had always wanted to touch it, to run his fingers through it, even since that first tentative conversation on the walls of Eden. When he looked back through his memories, Aziraphale found them stained with fingerprints the same color red as Crowley’s hair. And now…

“Crowley, would you mind if I touched your hair?” In response, he was granted a vigorous nod and a muffled assent spoken directly into the mattress. “It’s only… You’ve clearly taken such care to style it. I hesitate to make a mess of it.”

With something between a growl and a groan, Crowley ripped away the ribbon tying back his hair and tossed it aside. “Make a mess of me,” he demanded. Under the harshness of his voice, it sounded like a plea.

Desire sitting hot in his belly, Aziraphale draped himself along Crowley’s back, drunk on proximity. With one hand, he scratched gently along his demon’s scalp and watched the way his ringlets loosened. The other palmed at his rather lovely bottom. He was sorely tempted to banish every strip of clothing between them, his shirt and Crowley’s coat, but Gabriel’s words about frivolous miracles lingered in the back of his mind, and he feared wasting any more time to undress the human way.

“Are you planning to fuck me,” Crowley gasped, the back of his neck and ears almost as red as his hair. “Or are you trying to kill me?”

“Only a little death, I’m afraid.” Aziraphale dragged a finger up the back of one of the demon’s thighs, then asked, “Do you have anything for lubrication?”

“Top—top drawer…” Crowley waved vaguely in the direction of the table near the bed.

Aziraphale leaned over, loathe to put any space between them at all, and groped around in the drawer blindly until he felt the shape of a small bottle beneath his hand. He lifted it up so Crowley could see, and at the demon’s nod of confirmation, Aziraphale pulled the cork out with his teeth and poured out a slick drizzle of oil onto his fingertips. He rubbed his fingers and thumb together, warming them before reaching lower, kneading at the soft skin of Crowley’s perineum with firm, gentle strokes, matching pace with the hand he was using to massage his scalp.

Right there, at the precipice, Aziraphale had a moment of doubt. He had so little practical experience to go on here. One quick, fumbling encounter the winter before, his hands in breeches touching a body he couldn’t see. The memory of the touch of his own hands on his body, the knowledge of how he liked to finger himself when that mood struck him. The rest of what he knew was purely theoretical, all learned from books and art detailing the mechanics of lovemaking, and part of him worried that he wouldn’t measure up to Crowley’s previous lovers.

Then, he heard the broken-sounding noise Crowley made as he pressed a fingertip inside him, muffled as if the demon had put his mouth on his forearm to quiet himself, and Aziraphale decided that he didn’t care how many mortals Crowley had slept with or how they’d performed. Tonight, he was Aziraphale’s, and tonight, Aziraphale was going to make him come undone. He would give his demon all the pleasure he deserved.

He dragged his finger in and out, teasing the tight rim of his hole with a thumb, and felt Crowley slowly begin to go pliant under his ministrations. Aziraphale didn’t think he would ever get tired of touching him like this, of feeling the silky slide of Crowley’s body all around a piece of him, of the clench of his muscles and the surprising heat of him. He wondered what it might feel like to do this with his tongue, or to get him nice and loose and then slide his cock in all the way to the base.

 _Not now,_ Aziraphale thought, scolding himself as a shiver passed through his body. _This is about making_ him _feel good._

He started with how he knew to touch his own corporation. Even pressure, shallow at first and gradually working his finger deeper as Crowley’s body opened to him. The heel of his hand resting heavy on the nape of his neck, his palm cradling the back of his skull as his fingers working little circles against his scalp. Aziraphale found a steady rhythm that, judging by the wriggling, Crowley seemed to like, and kept it up with both hands. It wasn’t slow, exactly. _Slow_ was a luxury Aziraphale feared they didn’t have. But he refused to rush.

Neither of them would die if they stopped breathing. In fact, more than once in their early acquaintanceship, Crowley had been in the position of having to remind Aziraphale to start his lungs up again to keep from alarming the humans. The longer they were on Earth, though, the more human these bodies felt. He could feel each breath Crowley took, each stretch and shift of his wiry back pressing him closer to Aziraphale’s chest and belly. He could tell that Crowley was expending effort to keep his breathing purposely even because he could feel every time his control slipped. Each tiny hitch, each slow exhale that verged on a sigh, all bringing into sharp focus the degree of restraint Crowley was exhibiting.

“Is it—is it too much?” Aziraphale asked, his lips close to the shell of Crowley’s ear.

Crowley rolled his head over to rest it against the side of Aziraphale’s face. “N—nah. It can’t—there’s no such thing.”

“Hm,” he said, smiling against his lover’s skin. “Then is it not enough? Do you want more?”

Another hitch of his breath, another slip of that tight control as Crowley rolled his hips and forced Aziraphale’s finger deeper. On his next pull backwards, Aziraphale slid it all the way out and pressed a second against Crowley’s entrance, letting him feel it but waiting for confirmation before going further.

Crowley tried to push himself back onto them, then choked out a verbal response when he found that tactic thwarted. “Yes, bless it. More. I want more.”

At that, Aziraphale began to work both fingers inside, building to a pace just a touch quicker than before. He knew that his fingers were rather thick and short, and though he knew this felt good when he did it to himself, he hoped the stretch was pleasurable instead of uncomfortable for Crowley. He was better able to reach Crowley’s prostate this way, and the groan he got in response the first time he found it made his cock twitch. He didn’t touch it every time he pressed in, crooking his fingers against it only just often enough to tease, and each time he was rewarded with a muffled noise and the feeling of Crowley clenching down around him.

The stiff curls atop his demon’s head were breaking apart under his fingers at pace with the way the rest of the demon seemed to be melting into the mattress. Aziraphale noticed too late that some of that hair had gotten twisted around his finger and gave it a bit of a yank as he shifted position. Crowley took in a sharp, hissing breath and arched his back. He whispered soothing apologies in Crowley’s ear, trying to work the knot free with his thumb as gently as he could.

 _“Do that again,”_ Crowley gasped, and Aziraphale blinked.

“You want me to—to pull your hair?”

“Yessssss.”

As loathe as he was to cause Crowley any pain, it was the most direct request he’d been given all night, and Aziraphale wanted to please him. He finished untangling his finger, then moved his hand closer to the top of Crowley’s head and gathered a loose fistful of hair. In spite of his hesitance, Aziraphale had to admit to himself that he liked the way it looked, the spill of those red curls from between his fingers.

“Like this?” He asked, giving a gentle tug. Crowley’s body bucked beneath him.

“Mmm. Y—like that.”

Aziraphale realized that in his distraction, he had stopped the motion of the hand he’d been using to finger Crowley. He corrected his mistake, starting to fuck into him again while pulling backwards on the rather squashed remains of his coiffed hairstyle. Then, several things happened in rapid succession. He brushed against Crowley’s prostate at the same time that he gave a slightly firmer tug on his scalp, immediately followed by a pulse of infernal power. Crowley began to tremble and swear.

_“Fuckfuckfuckfuck.”_

“Crowley?”

“S’fine, I’m fine. Don’t—don’t worry. I just— _fuck.”_

“What happened? Did you… did you just manifest genitals?” He was given a quick jerk of the head and a mumbled confirmation. “… Unintentionally?”

Crowley groaned into his folded arms even as his thighs shook. _“Yeah.”_

With the way they were positioned, he would have to let go with one of his hands to look. Instead, he gave an affectionate scratch to the top of Crowley’s head and asked in his silkiest voice, “What did you make, dear? I want to hear you tell me about it.”

“A—a cock.”

“Good. That’s good. What has you worried?” Aziraphale pressed a kiss to the top of his ear. “I don’t understand. Do you still want me to pleasure you?”

“I do, I do, just— _ah!”_ Crowley cried out as Aziraphale began to move his fingers again. “M’not—m’not going to last.”

“That’s quite alright. You can come whenever you like.” For emphasis, he gave another languid stroke to Crowley’s prostate. The demon’s hands scrambled to grab ahold of the sheets.

When he had control over his mouth again, Crowley shuddered out a confession that sounded like it had escaped him as much against his will as had his Effort. “I don’t—I don’t want you to stop.”

An idea slotted into place in Aziraphale’s mind. Had Crowley been leaving himself blank, holding himself back from creating a set of genitalia in order to… prolong this? The thought of it was arousing, a bright new flicker of lust sparking up inside his corporation at Crowley’s cleverness. He would have to try that for himself sometime on his own, see how long he could last before he gave in. Or perhaps… perhaps he could arrange to arrive Effortless the next time he and Crowley met, and then let Crowley decide when he’d be allowed to change his corporation. The thought of it was dizzying.

As his fingers dragged across that bundle of nerves again, Crowley’s whole body jerked, hips snapping forward as he chased friction, though the hiss he gave in response seemed almost frustrated. Like it wasn’t enough.

That couldn’t be comfortable for him, Aziraphale assumed, with his cock trapped as it was between his own body and the edge of the mattress. No relief but the rough touch of coarse sheets and an itchy woolen blanket. Would Crowley’s skin be more sensitive like this, with his Effort so recently made? Would it chafe him, _hurt_ him? Aziraphale knew that Crowley was unlikely to complain, that he might try to suffer through any discomfort without saying a thing, and that simply wouldn’t do. There was no room for any of that between them.

He could think of several better places Crowley’s cock could find a home. Softer places, warmer. All good options, all places he’d thought about how Crowley might fit for longer than he could comfortably admit to, even in his own mind. But at the moment, one option in particular was becoming more appealing by the second.

“I know you were watching me eat this morning, at the café,” Aziraphale murmured, feeling the tickle of one of those auburn curls against his cheek, moved by the breath from his own lips.

Crowley froze beneath him. _“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”_ he whispered, his shoulders creeping up to near his ears as though he wanted to hide.

Aziraphale rubbed circles into the back of his neck with a thumb. “It’s alright. It’s only that I wondered…” Another quirk of his fingers dragged a gasp out of the demon. “…if it was because you were imagining my mouth on you.”

It seemed that all Crowley was capable of in reply was a strangled whine and a desperate squeeze of the blankets twisted between his hands.

“I’ll take that as a yes, dear,” Aziraphale said, giving the hair at the nape of Crowley’s neck one last tug and a quick press of his lips before settling back onto his knees on the ground behind him. “Now, should we perhaps… rearrange ourselves a bit?”

From where the top part of him was draped across the bed came a mumbled, “Myeh. Sure. Yeah.”

He gave a weak attempt to shift his legs, still tangled in his own trousers, and Aziraphale could only smile at the way he moved like his knees were too wobbly to control. Perhaps the poor dear could do with a bit of help. He withdrew his fingers slowly, his own cock taking interest in the way Crowley’s muscles clenched around him as he did, and gripped the narrow, bony divots of the demon’s hips with both hands. He was surprised again at how light Crowley was, and by the quiet yelp he heard as he picked him up and laid his torso against the mattress, he seemed to have surprised Crowley, too. Aziraphale rolled him over onto his back, earning himself another marvelous little noise, and found himself face to face with Crowley’s erection.

“Oh,” was all he could say, his eyes locked onto the drop of fluid shining at the tip. “Oh dear.”

It had been so long since he’d seen Crowley’s cock—though he supposed this was the first time anyone had seen this particular iteration of it, fresh as it was—and he’d _never,_ not in all the bathhouses and beaches they’d visited in those early days, back before he knew he’d could be interested in the sight of his friend’s body, _ever_ seen him hard. Nowhere outside of his own imagination, that was.

Crowley pushed himself up to a seated position, and for just the briefest of moments, Aziraphale caught sight of his eyes over the tops of his glasses before he fixed them. “Do you—do you not like it? I can try a— _fuck.”_

Aziraphale looked up again from where he’d leaned down to lick up the liquid at the tip of Crowley’s cock. “My dear, if you try to get rid of this again without letting me get a taste, I shall be quite cross with you.”

“Right. Well then. Ah. You can—I mean. If you want. S’fine.” Crowley seemed to give up on speech entirely and gestured vaguely at his own genitals. Some of his hair was stuck to the side of his face and what looked like spit or maybe even drool was smeared on his cheek beside his mouth, and Aziraphale couldn’t stand how much he was in love with this beautiful, messy creature.

“I’m terribly afraid that these might be in the way,” Aziraphale said, tugging at the trousers stretched taut between Crowley’s spread legs. With a snap, Crowley vanished all of his remaining clothing. His boots, too, Aziraphale noticed when he looked down and saw bare feet on the floor on either side of him. There was a faint pattern of scales adorning the tops of them, and if his tongue wasn’t about to be occupied elsewhere, he might be tempted to trace the transition between shiny black scale and pale, red-haired skin.

There were pink lines pressed into Crowley’s bony knees, most likely from the hard boards of the inn room floor and the rumpled folds of his wadded-up clothing. Aziraphale kissed each of knee in turn before reaching for the bottle of oil to get his hands nice and slick again.

“Now, then,” he said, pressing two fingers against the demon’s entrance. It opened for him almost immediately, the warm, wet slide of him welcoming him back inside. “You can watch me eat again. If you’d like.”

Crowley fell back on his elbows with a groan, landing heavily with a slight bounce against the mattress. Aziraphale felt him twitch as he wrapped his thumb and forefinger around the base of his cock. He knew there was a skill to this, the act of oral sex, and he had no experience either giving it or receiving it. His reading would only be so helpful, even if he did have an abundance of enthusiasm. It might not matter much, though. If Crowley’s assessment of the state of his own arousal was accurate… he might not have that long to experiment.

Aziraphale licked a broad stripe up the underside of Crowley’s cock, flicking his tongue once over the tip, and then took it all into his mouth. At the same time, he pushed his fingers deeper inside Crowley’s body, matching pace with his tongue and lips stroke for stroke. It was simple, with very little in the way of finesse or technique, but he felt Crowley’s thighs tense on either side of his head as though he was holding himself back from fucking up into Aziraphale’s mouth. All the while, Aziraphale was keenly aware of how closely Crowley was watching him. He felt his gaze on the back of his neck like a caress.

He tried to commit the moment to memory, all the little details he could hold onto for centuries to come. Crowley’s sharp, shallow breaths and bitten-off cries. The velvety soft flesh of Crowley’s beautiful cock, almost delicate yet so hard and blunt as it filled his mouth. The bitter hint of precome, the faint musky scent that clung to the skin beneath that patch of copper curls and in the crease of his thighs. Aziraphale couldn’t help but run the fingers of his free hand through his pubic hair, blunt nails dragging across the roots. If he could keep nothing else, he could keep the memory of what it was like to be right here, on his knees in some inn room in Montmartre, showing Crowley how loved he was. Putting his mouth to better use since it couldn’t say the words.

“A—Az— _ah…”_

There was a touch against the top of his head, tentative and light, and Aziraphale hoped Crowley would keep his hands there, hoped those long fingers would slide into his hair and hold him there while he sucked. Maybe there was something to it, this hair pulling business. Maybe he could find out why Crowley seemed to be so taken with it.

“‘Zira— _Ziraphale.”_

Hearing the sound of his own name spoken like that, breathless and threaded through with pleasure, sent a thrill along his spine. He wanted to hear it again as soon as possible. Aziraphale hollowed his cheeks and took as much of Crowley’s cock in his mouth as he could.

“I’m going to—”

 _Good,_ he thought fiercely. For the span of a heartbeat, he wondered if the spend of a demon would burn his mouth, and then he decided that he didn’t care. He closed his eyes and hummed his approval around the cock sitting heavy on his flattened tongue, pushing his fingers deeper in to nestle in the heat of Crowley’s body.

Crowley would not burn him. He’d tasted his lips and the soft split of his tongue where it forked. He’d wiped away sweat and tears from those sharp cheekbones, all those years ago in Spain, though of course they never spoke of that. He’d even known the stain of Crowley’s blood on his own skin. Why would this, the sweet spill of him in his mouth, be any different?

He heard a moan from above him as those grasping hands at last took ahold of him. A palm on his forehead, long fingers in his hair. Another hand on his cheek.

But it didn’t matter. Even if he’d never been shown evidence that this would be safe, even if he’d never touched Crowley’s body before this moment, he would know that Crowley wouldn’t hurt him. The idea that this, that any part of Crowley would burn him was ridiculous. He knew it instinctively, without needing proof, because belief—because _love_ without the need for proof was—

The hands on his face pushed him away, the velvety slide of Crowley’s cock pulling out of his mouth. The head of it caught on his bottom lip just before warmth spilled down his chin, the taste of it blooming salty and metallic wherever it landed on his tongue. Aziraphale sputtered in shock, not because Crowley had come—he had been warned, after all—but that he’d come _on_ his mouth instead of _in_ it. He felt a bit undignified as a rather large globule of it dripped out of the corner of his lip and onto the floor by his knees.

Aziraphale gently slipped his fingers free of Crowley’s body, reached up and wiped at his chin with his fingertips. He stared at his own hands, at the shadows in the lines of his palms, watching the way the lamplight flickered against the slick of the oil and of Crowley’s semen on his skin. He heard a snap and he was clean and dry again, almost as if it had never happened. Almost. The ghost of the taste of him still lingered in his mouth, bitter in a way he couldn’t help but savor.

“Sorry, _sorry,”_ Crowley was saying, and a glance upwards showed Aziraphale the stricken look on his face, the flex of his fingers as he reached out but did not touch. “I was—I wasn’t trying to… I didn’t want to just. You know. In your mouth. Didn’t seem—didn’t want to just, you know. Uh. Choke you.”

Even as Aziraphale watched the way Crowley cringed at his own words, a laugh began building somewhere deep inside him that he knew he was powerless to contain. It bubbled out of him as he pushed himself up off of his knees to stand, as he pressed his lips to Crowley’s sweaty forehead.

“You ridiculous fiend,” he chuckled, sitting down beside his demon on the narrow bed. “You couldn’t choke me unless I wanted to choke. I don’t need to breathe, remember?”

“…Oh.”

Feet still on the floor, Aziraphale rolled his neck and laid back on the mattress. Tentatively, Crowley followed him down. They had lain together like this many times before, side by side but never touching. It had been after Eden, that first time, but before the birth of Earth’s first child. The sands had been so warm beneath their wings even after the sun had gone down, and Crowley had pointed up at the vast sky above and taught Aziraphale the names of the stars that sparked and fell across the horizon. _Meteors,_ he’d called them, and the memory of Crowley’s eyes so bright in the darkness made Aziraphale’s stomach swoop like he was in freefall even all these centuries later.

He thought, perhaps, that under the present circumstances he might be permitted to touch. Aziraphale rested his cheek against Crowley’s shoulder, running a hand against the side of his own jaw and the corner of his mouth, fingertips making a pilgrimage to those places where his corporation’s skin and muscle remembered the feeling of the love they made. He took a deep breath, holding the scent of sex in his lungs like the perfumed smoke of incense, and smiled as he felt the jump of Crowley’s pulse beneath his ear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical Note:**  
>  Some of Petronius’s surviving writings discuss olives as an appetizer before dinner, and I looked around for a way of preparing them that had strong flavors in addition to the base “olive” taste. I decided on _epityrum_ , which uses picked olives and herbs, and was able to find a [recipe](https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/ancient-roman-cured-olives-epityrum/) translated into English from descriptions written by Cato and Columella. It would probably be served with bread.
> 
> A silly thing. Our friend the executioner was costumed like a _sans-coulette_ , a revolutionary who eschewed the shorter breeches of the type worn by Aziraphale and other high faloutin' folk in favor of the longer trousers worn by tradesmen (see this [lovely BTS shot](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/660826162808750100/715616652326207598/tumblr_fbdc3eb238de0db5a2d32179eb61cf40_3a442c76_1280.png?width=849&height=564) for a comparison). for a comparison). In modern usage, "coulettes" doesn't just refer to breeches, though. It is also a slang term in modern French for "panties". This means that (prior to them getting nakey) as Aziraphale is wearing Jean-Claude's outfit, and Crowley isn't wearing any undergarments, they are both _sans-coulettes_ in this chapter. Snrk.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Good News: In an effort to not go another six weeks between chapters this time, I've written the next chapter in advance this time! You can expect the next chapter next Friday, June 5th, and in the meantime, I will be trying to get ahead on chapter 5.  
> Better News: The next chapter immediately following this one (the one I already wrote) is ALSO mostly porn. Yay double porn!
> 
> I hope you're doing ok out there, wherever you are in the world. <3


	4. Rules

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is this… will this change things between us?” Aziraphale asked, hands stumbling over his buttons.
> 
> Crowley raised himself up on one elbow, his hair falling loose and wild over his shoulders. Not a single one of his meticulously styled curls from this morning had survived the vigor of their lovemaking, and Aziraphale felt his breath catch again at the realization that _he had done that, it’d been him._
> 
> “Do you want it to change things?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Friday, everyone. Here’s nine thousand more words of emotionally compromised and kinda-unhealthy-yet-loving porn.
> 
> **Content Note:** There is a fairly graphic and sexualized depiction of the process of Re-Making an Effort in this chapter. I called that bit the “origami handjob” in my notes, so… uh… you’ve been warned. See: the new “consensual body modification” tag.  
> Carrying over from last chapter, Aziraphale’s self-worth issues are still A Thing. One of the ways he processes that is by fantasizing about Crowley (consensually) being a possessive and a little mean to him during sex, including leaving bruises. This doesn’t happen anywhere outside of Aziraphale’s imagination. He also is struggling to see his body as something that belongs to him, so if that’s something you struggle with, please take care.
> 
> This chapter’s list of sex acts: hand jobs, demonically assisted genital transformations, vaginal fingering, vaginal intercourse. Aziraphale will start this chapter with a penis and end it with a vulva. Crowley, now that he has a penis, will not be getting rid of it again.

Aziraphale’s hair was sticking a bit to the light sheen of sweat coating Crowley’s chest, and he marveled at the simple humanness of that fact. Their corporations didn’t need to sweat any more than they needed to eat or sleep, but Crowley had let himself sweat. He wondered why that was. Crowley was the sexual expert between the two of them—maybe it made sex better, to let there be a mess? That was the way Aziraphale felt about certain desserts. Perhaps it was just another habit he’d gotten into and forgotten to turn off again, like his heartbeat. A thing he’d done to make his body seem less alien to the humans he seduced. Aziraphale wasn’t so full of himself as to think he’d been so good at sucking Crowley off that he made his body turn on some emergency cooling system. But, whatever the reason, it was… nice. It was nice that he got to see this.

Nearly thirty seconds passed, the only sounds in the room their own breathing. Then, Crowley put a hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder, light and testing, and broke the silence. With the two of them pressed as close as they were, Aziraphale was able to feel the vibration of his chest as he spoke, the rise and fall of his ribs.

“Angel, fuck… I—” Crowley panted. “I want to make you feel like that.”

A retort began to form in Aziraphale’s mind about how it wouldn’t really be _making anything up_ to Crowley that way, but it was immediately seared away by that thought he’d had earlier, when he’d first seen the demon appear in his prison cell, a thought he’d honestly believed he’d managed to put aside. Crowley behind him, holding him steady. Taking his pleasure however he liked, maybe even being the slightest bit _rough_ with him after all the trouble Aziraphale had caused. It was enough to make him take a breath, enough to make his own untouched cock twitch inside his trousers.

“Would you…” he began, running his fingers almost absentmindedly around his wrists, touching the place where Crowley had kissed his skin and healed the chafing from the shackles. He shifted positions, lifting himself up on an elbow so he could watch Crowley’s expression. “Would you like to fuck me?”

Crowley made a sound like he was trying to swallow his own tongue, then, _“Yeah._ ‘Course. Anything you like.” He pushed himself upright to a seated position. They both glanced down at Crowley’s lap, to where his newly minted cock was beginning to take renewed interest in the proceedings. “How do you want me?”

The ache in Aziraphale’s loins was becoming almost uncomfortable by this point, and if he was being honest, there was another fantasy that he had been fixated on for even longer than the one from this morning. Out of habit, he raised a hand to perform a miracle and shift his own anatomy, but Gabriel’s words— _almost_ enough to put him off sex altogether, but not quite—gave him pause. This was one miracle he wouldn’t want to be noted in his file. Instead, he took Crowley’s half-hard cock in that hand, relishing the warm velvet drag of it against his skin, and leaned in close to whisper.

“Do you remember the first time you let me touch you?”

Crowley breathed a stuttering, hissing exhale. “Can’t forget.”

“I can’t stop thinking about that marvelous little quim you’d given yourself. How it felt to get my fingers in you.” He gave another stroke, his fingers intentionally loose and teasing, and felt Crowley’s head drop forward onto his shoulder as he moaned. “And I have been dying to know how it would feel to have you inside me.”

_“Fuck,_ angel, yeah. Anything.” Crowley’s hips bucked, chasing the feeling of Aziraphale’s hand.

“You did such a good job making this,” Aziraphale continued, squeezing his thumb and forefinger gently around the head of Crowley’s cock and savoring the gasp he got in return. “I wonder… could your miracles affect my corporation?”

Crowley stilled, stiffened, and Aziraphale wondered if he’d said the wrong thing, had demanded too much or had taken this too far. Then, slowly, agonizingly slowly, his hand reached out to brush the line of Aziraphale’s erection through his trousers. The pressure was a relief after his cock had been so long ignored, but Crowley’s touch was so frightfully gentle he could barely stand it.

“You… you want me to change you?” Crowley asked, watching Aziraphale’s face as he ran two fingertips up the length of him. “Give you a—a cunt instead?”

_“Yes,”_ Aziraphale breathed, almost impatient as he tried to keep from grabbing Crowley’s wrist and pressing it against himself as hard as he needed. “And then I want you to hold me down and fuck me.”

Crowley’s cock was hard and hot in his hand, and he could feel the demon’s heartbeat through his palm—or perhaps that was his own, frantic with need.

“Right. Well… best get these off you, then,” Crowley said, his voice oddly strained as he let his other hand rest on the falls of Aziraphale’s trousers. Aziraphale gave a shimmy of appreciation as Crowley’s fingers slipped each button loose, as he felt his erection freed from behind rough cloth. He couldn’t see Crowley’s eyes, but he could feel the intensity of the demon’s gaze on his corporation even from behind the lenses of his glasses.

Aziraphale helped as best he could, wriggling out of his waistcoat and toeing off his boots over the edge of the bed where they landed with two solid thunks. Crowley divested him of his stockings and trousers in similar fashion—were they actually his and not some human’s, Aziraphale might have protested the way Crowley tossed them aside. As it was, Aziraphale was having difficulty concentrating on anything aside from the feeling of Crowley’s hands kneading at his thighs and almost giddy anticipation at what he knew was about to happen. He was still wearing his shirt— _his_ shirt, the one he’d bought from his new London tailor—the only stitch of clothing left between the two of them. It somehow felt more revealing to only be bare from the waist down, to part his thighs for Crowley to kneel between and feel the smooth slide of the linen against his nipples and the swell of his belly.

It felt transgressive to want this, any of this, but many of his favorite past times had felt the same way in the beginning. There was a trick he’d developed over the centuries to help him bypass the guilt, and he hoped it would work the same way tonight. If he closed his eyes and focused on the sensation of skin on skin, the sounds of Crowley’s ragged breathing, he could lose himself in the pleasure of it and not think of anything at all. There didn’t have to be any deeper meaning, there didn’t have to be anything to justify. Some things could just feel good.

“May I?” Crowley whispered, and when Aziraphale nodded he was briefly distressed to feel Crowley’s hands leave his thighs. Then he heard the sound of the bottle of oil being uncorked again, the slick drag of Crowley’s palms together as he warmed the oil in his hands.

Aziraphale gasped as he felt Crowley’s clever fingers twist around his shaft, the sheer heady rush of sensation. He gave his cock a few long, slow pumps, paying close attention to the head, and it felt so good that Aziraphale nearly changed his mind about being fucked and asked Crowley to keep going just like this. Then came the pulse of infernal power, sinking into his body from Crowley’s palm, tingling and just on the right side of too hot, and he couldn’t help but clap a hand over his own mouth to muffle his scream. It never felt like this on his own, all those times he had shifted his own anatomy.

“Did I hurt you?” Crowley asked, his voice sharp with worry.

“No, no. Good—good noise,” he said, biting his lip. “Is it—have you already switched it?”

“Almost,” came the answer, and with it, something Crowley did with his hands that sent a jolt of pleasure straight down the length of him to land somewhere deep inside his body.

It was enough to make his eyes flutter open again, to make to break his own rule and let himself look at what was happening. He was glad he did. Crowley was massaging him, shifting his flesh like clay beneath his hands, insistent hardness melting away into soft folds and an aching emptiness at his touch. Aziraphale watched as Crowley took control of his corporation, as he sculpted something new and totally _his._

“Do you like it?” Crowley asked, his voice soft, looking up from his work as the last inches of Aziraphale’s cock sank back down into his body. He circled the soft, sensitive clitoris that remained with a fingertip and Aziraphale all but squeaked in answer. Encouraged, Crowley kept up the rhythm.

When Aziraphale caught his breath, he said, “Yes. Yes, I lo—it’s very good. I—I always did say you had clever hands, my dear.”

“Do I?” Crowley’s lips twitched in something he would probably try to call a smirk, but Aziraphale knew better. “Does that mean you want me to…?”

One of those long fingers dipped lower, circling the entrance to Aziraphale’s body. By the way it slid across him, by the _sound_ it made, Aziraphale could tell he was already wet. He bit his lip and nodded. Crowley, the monstrous tease that he was, slipped in only a single fingertip. Enough to hint at penetration, enough to make him _imagine_ being filled, to make him want _more,_ but not enough to satisfy the hunger he felt. Good Lord. If Crowley ever wanted to tempt him— _really_ tempt him—Aziraphale knew he would be ruined.

“Go on, then,” he urged, shifting his hips. And then, _good Heavens,_ Crowley did just as he was asked.

Crowley’s hands were quick and nimble, both working in tandem to completely take Aziraphale apart. Even as he slipped a finger deep inside Aziraphale’s new, sensitive anatomy, Crowley continued working over his clitoris with a steady pace that pulled all manner of undignified noises out of his mouth. Gone were the tentative, fluttering, teasing touches from before. There was _pressure_ now. Intent. Nothing that hurt, nothing that rushed or overstimulated, but firm enough to massage away everything besides the waves of pleasure washing over him.

He wondered, dimly, if there was meaning behind the shapes Crowley’s fingertips pressed into his skin. Occult or ethereal, or the letters of some human alphabet. If there was a pattern to it, a language that Crowley knew that let him speak to Aziraphale’s body and say the kinds of things that weren’t meant to be said out loud. If there was a message, Aziraphale’s mind was too scattered to read it.

He chanced a look down towards the foot of the bed and groaned. It was too much. Seeing his own legs spread like that, lewd and wanton. Crowley kneeling between them, nude and hard again, his hair falling around his face. The ecstasy of his hands, clever fingers crooking deep inside Aziraphale's body, searching out all the places that made his nerves thrum with pleasure. He was staring with such focused intensity at Aziraphale's sex that part of him wanted to close his thighs and a much louder part of him wanted to hold himself open so Crowley could look as long as he liked. _Take_ whatever he liked.

There was—it was simply too much. Too much to deal with all at once.

The inside of his forearm wasn't a terribly interesting sight, and watching Crowley have his wicked way with him was unbearably erotic, but he was afraid he might literally catch on fire if he didn’t cover his eyes. It was overwhelming in the best way. He needed to reduce some of the sensory input somehow, and if the alternative were asking Crowley to stop—something under no circumstances he could allow to happen—he had to make the lesser sacrifice.

“Ohhhh,” Aziraphale heard himself saying. His hips rolled without his conscious input, fucking himself on Crowley's fingers. “Oh. _Please._ Please.”

“What is it?” Crowley asked, dragging another groan out of him as he thumbed over Aziraphale's clit.

“How—how many fingers are you— _Oh!”_

“Two,” he answered, and Aziraphale felt them shift inside him, moving separately instead of as one.

_Two._ Two fingers, and he felt like he was coming out of his skin. “More. Please, another.”

Crowley obliged him and added a third finger. The added stretch was nice enough, but Crowley's fingers were so very thin, and the way he moved them—no more clever twists, just a steady, mind-melting drag in and out of him, _fucking him_ —made Aziraphale ache to be filled still more.

Never let it be said that he was inconstant. He was, without fail, always a greedy little thing. He demanded so much of Crowley, but this, perhaps, would be something Crowley would be happy to give.

_“Fuck me,”_ he said, and the inexorable movement of Crowley’s hand slowed. Aziraphale reached down to the place where they were joined and laid a hand on his wrist. Crowley withdrew immediately, concern written in the thin line of his mouth.

“Aziraphale—?”

“Fuck me. Now.” He sat up, keenly feeling the emptiness left in the wake of Crowley’s fingers, and leaned in close to take a searing kiss from the demon’s lips. “Please. I want you to.”

Crowley didn’t close his mouth again right away, and Aziraphale thought he looked rather adorably dazed like that, with his lips parted like he was only thinking about wanting to be kissed some more. Then, all at once, he seemed to come to life again.

“Angel, I— _yes,”_ he breathed, and Aziraphale turned around to get himself in the position he craved. “I want to—oh, bugger. Shit, just… just a second...”

He heard the clatter of the bottle of oil as it fell off of the bed and onto the floor, felt the mattress dip behind him as Crowley leaned over to grope for it. When he looked back, the demon had just righted himself, face flushed in triumph and the lubricant once again securely in hand. Aziraphale watched for a moment in restless anticipation as Crowley got the cork free and stroked his erection with a slick hand, then tore his eyes away.

Aziraphale had already been kneeling, but he lowered his face to the pillow and pushed apart his knees. This left his bottom up in the air, his quim bare and wet and desperate to be fucked. He grabbed onto one of the slats in the headboard with one hand, his other holding tightly to his own wrist, fingers wrapped around the place where steel had rubbed his skin raw only this morning. It wasn’t that he wanted to be _bound,_ exactly, though the idea wasn’t unappealing. He just wanted the reminder.

Only a few seconds passed, but to Aziraphale, it felt like he was waiting forever. Finally, _finally,_ he felt the touch of a strong, thin hand on his hip, felt the blunt nudge of Crowley’s cock as he positioned it at his entrance.

“You ready?” he asked, his voice rough and quiet as he gave a little squeeze to the soft flesh padding Aziraphale’s hip.

Everything Aziraphale could think to say was either too impatient and pushy— _just do it, dear boy, please just ravish me_ —or too close to the kind of risky, foolish confession he couldn’t take back without hurting them both. Instead, he squared his shoulders and braced his knees, kept his eyes fixed on his own knuckles and the places they went pale, and gave a quick, firm nod.

Crowley gave a long, shaky exhale as he pushed in with one slow and ceaseless press that stretched Aziraphale apart and held him open around his cock. It was obtrusive, intrusive, the knowledge that part of Crowley was inside part of him, but it wasn’t invasive. It felt transgressive but exciting, and a bit like coming home, and Aziraphale thought he was doing a bang-up job ignoring the lingering fear that he was doing the wrong thing, because how could something that felt so much like relief be denied? The voice that told him, _“you shouldn’t be doing this because you’re an angel”_ was all but silenced beneath the voice that said, _“you shouldn’t be doing this because it isn’t safe.”_ He could barely hear either of those beneath the furious, snarling thing inside him that asked why he’d let fifty-seven centuries pass before letting himself know what this felt like.

As Crowley bottomed out, pressing into Aziraphale with the soft scrape of pubic hair, he kneaded his backside with the gentle tug of palming hands that stretched him deliciously, obscenely wider around his cock. _“‘Ziraphale,”_ he groaned. “That’s—this feels—”

“I know,” Aziraphale said, squeezing down around him and relishing the huff of aroused surprise he was given in return.

He began to pump his hips, each thrust languid and deliberate, and Aziraphale was shocked to discover just how acutely he could hunger even as he was being filled, just how much more he could still want even as he was being given what he’d so long denied himself. It felt maddeningly good, almost exactly what Aziraphale needed. The way Crowley’s hands added to the push and pull of it, the way they moved Aziraphale’s body in time with his own, all of that was so close to perfect, but there was still a part of him that sang out to be held and used. To be found to be useful. It was just so gentle, not the kind of fuck that would leave him tender and aching hours later. The only memories it would leave behind would be inside Aziraphale’s head, not pressed into the soft parts of his corporation like a secret he could take with him after this was over.

Aziraphale pictured it, then. What it might have been like this morning. Chains still on, knees on hard stone instead of this lumpy mattress. The Crowley in his mind was more impatient, almost angry, and why wouldn't he be? What had Aziraphale done to deserve such thoughtful, careful touches? The Crowley in his mind wasn't concerned with any of that, he just took, and took, and _took._ The lewd slap of hips against his backside, echoed by the clink of chain. The collar of Aziraphale's linen shirt pulled back past his shoulder. Crowley's mouth, hot against his skin as he fucked him. Teeth leaving marks all along the side of his neck. Leaving proof of what they'd done, marking Aziraphale's body as something claimed. Something wanted.

They couldn't, of course. But...

...but what if they could? What if he slid this shirt up over his arms and asked Crowley to do as he will? He could see it now. A tangle of bruises sucked into his neck. Next to his nipples. All along the insides of his thighs. A bite on his hip. Tender, pink lines crisscrossing his back marking the paths of Crowley's fingernails. His whole body a map they'd make together. He couldn't look at a piece of himself without seeing a reminder of what they'd done there.

He would be able to keep it all night, and look at it, and relish the sweet ache of it until morning. And then, when the sun rose, he would ask Crowley to heal it all away again. To erase the proof. To consign all this to memory. Perhaps he would allow himself one to keep, though. Somewhere it wouldn't be seen. His inner thigh, perhaps. And he'd keep that with him until his human-like body healed it away, too.

Crowley would do it, he knew. He would heal him again, and that champagne bubble feeling of his magic would spread all through Aziraphale's body, everywhere they'd touched. Wouldn't that be something?

Unless...

Unless, of course, he didn't do it. Unless he decided to leave Aziraphale marked, refused to help heal them away. Chose to claim him not here in private, not just between the two of them, but in front of anyone who could see.

He wouldn't do that. Crowley wasn't unkind, especially to Aziraphale. He'd do as he was asked, he wouldn’t... wouldn’t put him in danger like that. _Them._ That was a silly thing to be afraid of. He’d long since learned that, for a demon, Crowley so rarely ever chose to be cruel.

But he was a demon. A demon Aziraphale loved, but a demon. And there were things Aziraphale still couldn't ask of him, no matter how much he wanted to. He couldn’t ask Crowley to mark him up like he was a claimed, kept thing, because he _wasn’t._ He never could be. They—they didn’t belong to each other. He wasn’t Crowley’s, not in any way that counted. This body, this—this corporation. It didn’t even really belong to Aziraphale. It was Heavenly property. He just… lived in it. Even if they hid the proof, even if they got away with this and no one ever found out… it felt too much like betrayal to ask to be chosen when that wasn’t a decision that he was free to make.

He wasn’t sure, really, who he’d even be betraying. Whether it would be Heaven, or Crowley.

Better, then, to not ask for it at all.

Better still not to dwell on it.

“Harder, please,” Aziraphale asked, spreading his knees a bit further apart. “I’m a Principality, for Heaven’s sake. You won’t break me.”

There was a brief pause, a missed beat in the steady pace Crowley had built up. A quick exhale. Aziraphale felt him shift on his knees behind him, finding a better position. His hands, warm and slightly sweaty, slid down from Aziraphale’s hips to find a hold on his shoulders. Crowley pulled back, almost all the way out, and then snapped his hips forward. Again, faster the second time. He built up a new pace, so quick Aziraphale had no time to think between the cresting waves of pleasure that followed in the wake of each thrust.

“Is this—” Crowley asked, around a bitten-off groan. “—what you wanted?”

Aziraphale braced himself against the headboard, turned his face away from the pillow so he could be heard. “Yes, _yes._ Just like— _mmm_ —just like this. Keep doing that.”

The change in angle was exactly what was needed, and Aziraphale felt like he was only still in his body at all and not floating in a haze of lust up near the ceiling because of the hands holding him together, warm and steady and safe. Better still was the moment when Crowley shifted again, planting his palm flat on Aziraphale’s back for balance, all of his spare weight pressing down in that one point of contact between his shoulder blades. Aziraphale felt like a butterfly then, pinned right between where his wings were hidden. He gave a low, needy moan as he fought the mad urge to take them out in this tiny, dingy inn room and ask Crowley to grab them by the roots and not let go.

As much as he had been fixated on the hand on his back, Aziraphale had not paid any attention to Crowley’s other hand until he felt two slender fingertips on either side of his clit, giving him something to grind against as he rocked backwards to meet each thrust. He should have been quiet. He should have muffled the sounds of his breathing with the pillow beneath his face, swallowed down his moans, but he did not. There was something joyful in the creak of the bedframe, in the slap of skin on skin, the shattered-sounding noises from Crowley’s throat behind him. For a handful of minutes, he forgot to worry who might hear them. All he cared about is that they were louder than the birds that sang outside the window, up before the sun but only just.

His orgasm built slowly, but he tipped over the edge like missing a stair in the dark. Even as his muscles seized and pleasure burst bright and shuddering behind his eyes, he felt the sharp heat of something old and unnamable surge through his body like he was a lightning rod, powerless to do anything but let it flow through him. It sparked through his nerves, lighting him on fire from the inside out. Something was waking inside of him, something that had been sleeping fitfully in his belly, and it twisted and writhed and burned.

He heard the sharp intake of breath, felt Crowley’s rhythm stutter as his control began to waver. “Inside me,” Aziraphale asked, pushing back against the headboard with both hands. “Please.”

Four more thrusts, shallow and erratic. The slide of Crowley’s hand down Aziraphale’s spine to cup the back of his head, the slip of long fingers into his hair. That was all it took, and then he was spilling hot and slick inside of Aziraphale’s body, Crowley following him over the edge with a cry that sounded almost like a sob.

They didn’t so much as separate from one another as collapse face-first onto the bed, corporations still halfway tangled together. Somehow, in all of that, Crowley’s softening cock slipped free, leaving a trail of cooling spend in its wake all along the back of Aziraphale’s thighs. He knew he should clean it, should find a damp cloth or else ask Crowley for another miracle, but he didn’t. Not yet. Not when his limbs were still heavy with a pleasant, well-fucked ache, not when the faint buzz of their coupling still lingered in his mind like a glow. Crowley had spoken in the past of what it was like to bask in the sun as a serpent. If it was anything like this, Aziraphale understood why he loved it.

His demon was sprawled out beside him on his belly, a boneless, beautiful thing. Aziraphale stole a lingering glance, drinking up the sight of him like this, prone and vulnerable and naked. They had been in such a rush earlier he’d barely gotten a chance to look at him properly. Crowley was all long lines and sharp angles, all bone and lean muscle, and so peaceful like this with hair the color of a sunrise spilling out over the pillow around him.

Aziraphale bit the inside of his lip when he saw the raised edges of the scars on Crowley’s back. He’d seen them before, of course. Not tonight. Not when they’d been half-clothed or back-to-front or too distracted to notice much of anything at all. No, it had been more than a thousand years since he’d seen Crowley naked. Before even the Arrangement. It had been hot, and he’d been swimming, and Aziraphale had been too afraid to take a step from the shore even though he wanted to join him.

He knew that Crowley sometimes let things scar. Vanity, he supposed. Maybe pride. But he always let them fade over time. Not these, though. They had never spoken of how Crowley had come by those scars, those twin burns as long as a forearm on his shoulder blades. They’d never needed to. Back in Heaven, before he knew anything of humans or demons or pain, Aziraphale had watched the way the wings of the rebels had caught alight and burned. They carved wounds through the sky as they Fell, and it would take some time on Earth before Aziraphale could see a meteor shower without smelling ash.

He was a little embarrassed to think of the way he’d first thought of the scars. A warning, a reminder of what happened to those who failed. Indelible marks on Crowley’s corporation like his serpent brand, telling all who saw them who and what he was. Aziraphale wasn’t sure what he thought about them anymore, except that he knew sorrow was a part of it. He kept his hand flat on Crowley’s arm where it had landed, and did not move it, because his fingers itched to trace over the edges of them to feel the border between skin and scar. Wanted to soothe and pet. He resisted the urge, not knowing if it might be taken as an insult, or if it would embarrass his lover. Make him self-conscious, like it did to have Aziraphale see his eyes. He didn’t even rule out the possibility that touching them might cause pain.

Crowley rolled over onto his side, flushed and panting. Aziraphale was seized by the desire to gather him up in his arms, lanky tangle of limbs that he was, and hold him until he slept. Let anyone, be they human or demon or angel, dare to wake him from that gentle slumber.

“Angel…” he murmured, the sweetest smile teasing at the corner of his lips. “Aziraphale, I…”

Even with those spectacles on, Aziraphale could see that there was an openness to his expression that spoke of a kind of contentment and trust Crowley normally kept carefully locked away behind a front of practiced disdain. What might he see if those dark lenses weren’t in the way?

Aziraphale felt his pulse quicken, and he knew that although part of the reason for that was giddy anticipation, another part was down to everyday, all too familiar _fear._ The moment stretched on, balanced as if on the blade of a sword, and Aziraphale felt danger waiting on both sides for them to topple and fall. For centuries, his most shameful secret had been his love, so much deeper than what he felt for the rest of God’s creatures, for a demon— _his friend_ —and as the years had crept by, he had almost come to fully believe that Crowley loved him in return. The thought that he might be able to hear that, to receive confirmation after hundreds of years of wondering, was as thrilling as it was terrifying.

Aziraphale leaned forward and kissed the words off of Crowley’s lips, unwilling to hear them. If it remained unspoken, it wasn’t real. If it remained unspoken, he could pretend for just a little longer that things could carry on as they had since the beginning. Secret and never, _never_ enough, but comforting and familiar all the same. Besides, what did one even do when one was in love? Certainly nothing the two of them would be able to do. It would only hurt them more to part again and again if it was said aloud, if it was _known._

The kiss was long and slow, and only broke when the slam of a door on the street outside the inn startled them both apart. Only then, with the illusion shattered, did Aziraphale notice how much the bed had begun to feel like an island. It felt like waking from a dream to be reminded that more existed than the four walls of Crowley’s room.

Crowley sighed. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Just like before, he vanished the evidence with a gesture of his hand. No more spend or slick or sweat or oil. For just the briefest of moments, Aziraphale was almost angry at the loss. That even the mess they made was something he would have to give up. At the same time, he knew that it was a ridiculous thing to think. What would he have done otherwise? Walked around with ejaculate on his legs, under his trousers? No. Of course he wouldn’t have. That would have been uncomfortable, not to mention unhygienic and improper.

The thing he was actually upset about wasn’t so base as any of that, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that, either. Besides, he didn’t really need to _keep_ something from tonight to prove to himself that it had happened. He could carry the proof in his memory where it was safe. Where it couldn’t be found.

“So,” Crowley said, pulling him out of his strange and uncomfortable sulk. “The turn of the century, you said?”

Aziraphale blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your bookshop.” The demon rolled over all the way onto his back and tugged the blanket up over his narrow hips. “You said you thought it was still going to take a few years to get everything sorted, but that it might happen at the turn of the century.”

“Yes… Oh. Yes! Of course.”

“Have you figured out what you’re going to call it?” Crowley asked. “Have a little notebook of names somewhere you’ve been testing out?”

Aziraphale got the distinct sense that he was about to be thoroughly wound up, and he loved it. He looked over at him, wide-eyed and unassuming. “I’m taking suggestions.”

“Good, because I just know your bosses are going to try and get you to name it something trite and predictable like _The Holy Word_ and I cannot stand for that.” He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and spoke as if reading from a list of completely normal names and not inventing the ludicrous things on the spot. “Aziraphale Fell’s Discount Bible Bin.”

He tried not to crack a smile. _“Crowley.”_

“Mister Aziraphale Ziraphale Fell's Emporium of Antiquated and Rare Books, Volumes, and Parchments.”

“That isn’t my real middle name.”

“Of course not, but I figured spelling your whole true name out in the authentic celestial tongue might melt a few too many mortal minds. Now, if you’ll stop interrupting, I have quite a long list to get through.” He cleared his throat again. _“Carpe Librum—”_

“Crowley, that was _one time—”_

“—because you know I haven’t forgotten about that thing you did in Prague—”

Aziraphale laughed in spite of himself even as he said, “Hush, you ridiculous serpent.”

Crowley affected a deep, pompous voice and spread his hands in a grand gesture. “The New Library of Alexandria: This Time We Fireproofed It.”

He clicked his tongue. “That’s such a tasteless joke.”

“It has been eighteen hundred years, and you know they made copies of most everything in the collection.” An arched eyebrow. “It would be an accurate name, given how many of their scrolls you have hoarded. You’re lucky it burned before they tried to collect your overdue fees.”

There was the faintest glow of pale gray dawn peeking in between the slats of the shutters of Crowley’s window. Aziraphale didn’t want to look at it. He wanted to keep looking at Crowley, at all the shadows that clung to his face and the shine of the lamplight on his teeth when he laughed. The lamp would burn as long as they wanted it to, but the shadows were starting to fade, and each noise outside made his eyes dart away faster than he could stop himself.

When he looked back the last time, he saw that Crowley was staring up at the ceiling.

“You aren’t staying in Paris.” It wasn’t a question.

Aziraphale bit his lip. The birds were getting louder. “No.”

Crowley looked back over at him. Naked as he was, all of the little signs of discomfort Aziraphale had learned to look for over the years were even more apparent. He was able to watch the full bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, see the tension in his bare arms as he palmed his hands over the tops of his thighs, flexing his fingers. He snapped, quick and jerky like he was trying to do it before he talked himself out of it. Aziraphale felt the prickle of infernal power in the air.

“There'll be a boat waiting. To, ah... to take you back across.”

A slow growth of pain started up then, just behind Aziraphale's ribs, like something was growing in him, like that something had thorns. Crowley must have seen some of that hurt and confusion cross his face because he held his hands up between them like a plea, like a surrender.

“You said you're not supposed to be over here, that, uh. That your side, they don't know you left London. _Satan_ , Aziraphale, don't think that—it's not that I don't want—” Crowley's words failed him again, and he growled in frustration as he stumbled over whatever he was trying to say. “I'm trying to make sure you don't get caught here.”

The pain settled and shifted. Dulled. Less like a tear, more like a bruise. Rules, guidelines, safety. Things he'd forgotten all about in the last few glorious, shining hours. Something they'd need to live with if they ever wanted to do this again.

Most of his clothing had ended up on the floor close by, thankfully. He reached for what he could with numb hands, rolling his stockings up and slipping back into his trousers while he sat on the edge of the mattress, feeling Crowley’s eyes watching him all the while. Aziraphale took his time tying each ribbon back in place, smoothing each fold of fabric, lamenting the fact that he’d put his coat and jabot on the chair so far away. Taking care to tuck his shirttail, to fasten the falls of his trousers with infinite precision. It was a silly thing to do, he knew, but he stole each second that he could. Once he got up out of the bed, he knew couldn’t get back in.

Aziraphale pulled his waistcoat on, pushed his arms through and let it hang open over his chest. One more layer on. One more layer between him and the world. Between him and Crowley. He should just keep his mouth shut and go. He shouldn’t push it. That would be the smart thing to do, but—

“Is this… will this change things between us?” Aziraphale asked, hands stumbling over his buttons.

Crowley raised himself up on one elbow, his hair falling loose and wild over his shoulders. Not a single one of his meticulously styled curls from this morning had survived the vigor of their lovemaking, and Aziraphale felt his breath catch again at the realization that _he had done that, it’d been him._

“Do you want it to change things?”

_Desperately._ But he couldn’t. _They_ couldn’t. There was no future for them, no happy ending where they got to have all the frivolous little things Aziraphale thought about on long carriage rides and in the pale blue hours just before the dawn when his mind wandered. No holding hands in the sunlight, no happy little home to build together, no way to claim one another in any way but in secret little moments like these that would never truly be enough. They were on opposite sides, hereditary enemies, and no matter how much he loved Crowley, he’d always be a demon, and Aziraphale would always be an angel.

It would be easier if they’d been created as humans, because even if it meant they carried with them the burdensome certainty of aging and death, they would have lives of their own to seize before the end. The only certainty Aziraphale and Crowley had was the End, a battle that would claim one of them if not both, and there was no escape from that. All Aziraphale could do was try to take what little joy he could before then, and to keep them both safe for as long as he could. Until he couldn’t anymore.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, his voice soft, and the sound of his own name twisted Aziraphale’s silly little heart with more love and fear and sorrow than four syllables had any right causing.

He couldn’t. He couldn’t say it, couldn’t tell the truth. What would be the point? Why torment them both with a taste of something that would never be allowed to happen? The words would feel so empty if he had no intention of acting on them—if it wasn’t in his _power_ to act on them. Crowley deserved better than that.

“Crowley, you’re…” Aziraphale began, and swallowed. “You’re my dearest friend.”

There was a sharp inhale of breath. Crowley seemed to struggle for his words for a moment, then said, “I sense a _‘but’_ coming.”

Aziraphale nodded, stiff. “But we can’t. We can’t let this change things.”

“Right, yeah.”

“Our sides wouldn’t—”

“No, I expect our sides _wouldn’t_ like it if they knew you had your angelic hands up my arse,” he said, and it wasn’t the harshness in his tone or the crudeness of his words that made Aziraphale grimace but the pain that was so raw behind them, “no more than they’d like hearing that you set up a cattle theft in Edinburgh or about any of the rest of the shit we’ve done for each other. We still _did_ all of that, though.” He turned towards the wall.

“That’s…” Aziraphale said, reaching out a tentative hand for Crowley’s shoulder. The demon flinched at the touch but relaxed into it almost immediately. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”

Crowley’s head whipped back around so quickly Aziraphale worried about his neck. “What d’you mean?”

“I mean… well, we already have the Arrangement, don’t we?” Even here, even when it was just the two of them, he still struggled to even speak of it. Crowley nodded, something that looked suspiciously like hope blooming on his face. “What if we just… amended it a little? Nothing much would have to change. But if we end up in the same place, we might… meet up, as usual. Drink as usual. But maybe—only if you wanted, of course—we might… have the odd assignation on top of it, if the mood struck us?”

There was a strange quirk to his lips, and Aziraphale briefly thought Crowley might be about to tease him for his awkward, stilted phrasing. Instead, he only nodded and said, “Alright.”

_So simple,_ Aziraphale thought. _If only we’d figured this out about eight hundred years earlier, we could have been doing this all along._

Crowley let out a long, shuddering sigh, then slapped the tops of his legs. “You’d better go, angel. You know what kind of neighborhood this is, what kind of place I’m staying in. What it’ll, ah… look like. You know, if you try to sneak out in the morning.”

Aziraphale blinked. He tried to remember the last time Crowley had ever directly told him to leave, and he couldn’t think of one. He wasn’t sure it had ever happened before… but Crowley wasn’t wrong.

“Of course,” he said, standing with slightly unsteady legs. “Could you… Do you know where you’re going next?”

Crowley shook his head. “Downstairs doesn’t like giving too much of a heads up on that.”

“Right. Naturally. My side is also… a bit abrupt at times.”

Aziraphale retrieved his boots and wandered over to the chair under the window for the rest of his clothes. He dressed quickly and in silence. Crowley kept looking over at him like he wanted to say something, but it wasn’t until Aziraphale was tying his jabot that he spoke.

“I bet it won’t take long,” he began, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the still room. He shook his head and tried again at a lower volume. “These humans keep causing problems for themselves. Won’t be long before we end up sent to the same mess again.”

“No. No, I… I imagine it won’t.”

He was standing in the doorway now, and he couldn’t imagine how earlier he’d thought the inn room was small or cramped. Crowley was still in the bed and the distance between them seemed impossible to cross. Aziraphale wanted to go back, to kiss him goodbye. That was what lovers did, wasn’t it? Then again, they weren’t normal lovers. Besides, if he kissed him again, Aziraphale knew he wouldn’t stop.

“Take care, Crowley,” he said, and turned to go.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley called out to him as he was pulling the door closed behind him, and Aziraphale turned back to look at him through the gap. “Try not to get arrested again.”

“I’ll… I’ll do my best.” He gave a weak smile and shut the door between them.

Aziraphale stepped out onto the streets of Montmartre just as the first orange-gold band of sunrise slipped over the horizon, and he wondered absently if it was blasphemous to wonder if She had picked the color to match the eyes of his demon.

Given enough time, he might have been able to convince himself this had been nothing more than submitting to the whims of their corporations, simple stimulation and nothing more. No additional meaning, just... a physical pleasure, like food was for Aziraphale and sleep was for Crowley. He didn’t think he wanted to convince himself of that, and right now, it didn't matter. He couldn't have if he tried, not when every step let him feel where Crowley had been inside him.

But he knew he needed to watch himself. He couldn’t get sloppy like he almost did back in the inn. It had been easier, before this. When they could pretend like there was nothing between them. They couldn’t pretend that anymore. They had started something that they wouldn’t be able to stop, and right now, Aziraphale felt like the most dangerous thing in either of their lives.

How selfish he’d been, longing for a love out in the open. Wasn’t it enough for him to have any love at all? He would do all he could to keep their secret, to protect his demon. Love was something precious, something worth hiding. _Saving._ For if it were to be discovered, it would be destroyed, and the both of them along with it.  


* * *

  


As soon as the door closed behind Aziraphale, Crowley tossed his sunglasses onto the side table, rubbed the sides of his nose where they’d been sitting for too long, and smushed his face into the pillow. No one was here, so it was fine for him to act like a pathetic bastard, wallowing with a nose full of angel scent in a set of sheets that still had a damp spot in them even though the warmth was gone.

He laid there for a long time, until the sun was all the way up and the streets were loud again with traffic. He might have screamed into the pillow for a bit, might have had some stern words for his cock about what the expectations were around here about coming embarrassingly quickly all over the angel’s—oh _fuck,_ yeah. He’d done that. That had been a thing that happened. That was a thing he’d have to live with for the rest of his immortal life, unless God decided to take pity on him and send a bolt of lightning his way. Unlikely. In his experience, She wasn’t the merciful sort. So… he did a bit more muffled screaming, which transitioned into a fit of helpless, hysterical giggles when he remembered that in French the terms for getting struck by lightning and what he’d accidentally done to Aziraphale’s chin sounded very similar, and he couldn’t stop himself from imagining the angel saying the latter in his mangled accent.

When he was calm enough to focus again, Crowley set to work. They’d had sex. Aziraphale seemed to want to do it again, possibly multiple times. He’d called him his _“dearest friend,”_ had asked to incorporate their having sex into the Arrangement ( _assignations,_ he’d said—Crowley was in love with an absolute menace, wasn’t he?), all in the same day that he’d nearly let some humans cut off his head. Crowley knew he was a demon with a history of finding himself in a good position and then fucking it up in spectacular fashion, and he was determined not to let that happen here. He needed to come up with a plan.

Crowley hated rules. He prided himself on thumbing his nose at them whenever he could. Regular old scofflaw, he was. But Aziraphale... it wasn't so much that Aziraphale loved rules. It was more that he was bound by them. A lot of them were ones imposed by Heaven, but many were ones that Aziraphale himself wrote. They kept him in line, doing what he was supposed to, _being_ who he was supposed to be. Oh, he was a master at circumventing them, finding loopholes and more favorable interpretations to the conditions he operated under to let himself do whatever it was that he bloody well wanted. It was a large part of why Crowley loved him so much, that cleverness, that streak of wicked creativity he'd always deny.

But the fact remained that Aziraphale lived his life inside a set of rules so convoluted and arbitrary that Crowley sometimes wondered if the angel even knew what they all were. And as much as he found them frustrating and, at times, ridiculous, Crowley knew that he had to operate inside that set of rules too if he wanted to be in Aziraphale's life at all.

Over the last several centuries, he had developed what he'd thought had been a fairly thorough working understanding of the situation between them, most of those lessons learned by trial and error. Tonight turned all of that on its head. There were new rules he hadn't even thought to consider, and the absence of older rules he'd thought were immutable. It would help if he had half a fucking clue what he was supposed to make of all of this, but of course, it seemed as though the “ _Aziraphale never explicitly states what the rules are_ ” rule was still in effect.

Right. Well. Crowley was an expert by now at deciphering the angel's inconsistent dithering. He reached into the second drawer of the table by his bed and retrieved a pen and his pad of paper.

Aziraphale was skittish, though he’d gotten better over time, and there were things that Crowley knew that made it more likely to entice him to stick around instead of scaring him off. Guidelines.

At the top of the page, he wrote, _“Always have a pretext for meetings.”_ Well, Aziraphale had taken care of that part, the clever bastard.

_“Always have plausible deniability.”_ That one was a bit harder, but at least he didn’t have to convince Aziraphale himself about this. Whatever the angel had told himself to excuse why it was alright to have sex with a demon, he seemed confident about it. There really wasn’t an excuse that would help them if they got caught shagging like mad by either of their sides, so if that happened all Crowley could really do was apologize quickly before they got dragged off for whatever fucked up punishment their supervisors could dream up for them. Best not get caught, then.

_“Never make him feel like a bad angel for doing something he likes.”_ Since it seemed as though Crowley himself now made the cut, he was eager to find new and exciting ways to fulfil that rule.

_“Never stick around long enough to make him ask you to leave.”_ He did a bang-up job of that one today. Yes, well done Crowley. Got a bit ahead of himself, told Aziraphale to get out. Almost made him cry, too, by the looks of it. But he’d needed him out of here, out of Paris. Back where he was supposed to be, in London, before his bosses started snooping around to ask where he’d been. His miracle would make sure no human bothered Aziraphale on his way back through the city, since it would be impossible to walk him back himself.

Even still, Crowley needed to keep from staying where he wasn’t wanted, or making the angel feel like he needed to hang around afterwards out of… politeness. Obligation. No, that wouldn’t do. He needed to set a boundary. For all his rough execution earlier, making sure to leave by dawn didn’t seem like too unreasonable of a guideline. He added it as a note out to the side.

He cast his mind back to this morning, trying to piece together what he had learned over the course of this completely mental day. It had started in a prison, and Aziraphale had acted like this whole thing had been some elaborate way of thanking him for getting him out of there. He didn’t like that, it made him feel a bit dirty and not in the fun kind of way. Part of him wondered if tonight would have happened at all if Aziraphale hadn’t been so upset, so reckless… _“Never make him feel like he owes you.”_ He underlined that one, for good measure.

After that had been lunch. Crowley wrote, _“Take angel out for crêpes as often as is feasible,”_ then immediately crossed it out. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to survive that again. _“Never take angel out for crêpes again.”_ He ended up drawing a line through that one, too. Out of the question. Finally, he settled on, _“Banish all genitals before taking the angel out to eat crêpes, or anything that would involve prolonged licking.”_

Then… well. Then there’d been rather a lot of drinking, and kissing, and sobering up, and then more kissing, and then Aziraphale had all but reduced him to begging before he’d even given himself any genitals to work with. Crowley wasn’t sure if he had enough to go on to establish reliable patterns for the angel’s preferences as far as Efforts and acts went, but he hoped with enough time and research he could figure that part out, too.

One thing he had managed to pick up on was that Aziraphale didn’t seem to want to have sex face-to-face. The one time they had, when Crowley had been kneeling between Aziraphale’s legs, he had kept his eyes screwed shut like he didn’t want to watch. He’d even put an arm up over them. And then he’d rolled over again. It was fine. Everyone had their own likes and dislikes, and Crowley could work with this.

The glasses, though. Those seemed to be an important point. Every time they’d had sex so far, even that first time a year and a half ago in Stockholm, Aziraphale had made sure Crowley’s eyes were covered. Crowley got it. Unblinking snake eyes were probably a mood killer, if not a direct challenge to whatever excuse Aziraphale was telling himself that made it okay for him to fuck a demon. That was… alright. It stung a bit. But he could live with it, if it meant that he got the rest of everything else. _“Don’t show him your eyes,”_ he wrote, scrubbing a hand over his stubble.

Then came the hard part. It was obvious that this was all physical for Aziraphale, that it was about pleasure and not much else. Companionship, maybe. They were friends. _Dearest friends,_ his mind unhelpfully supplied. But the fastest way to scare the angel off, Crowley thought, would be to unload a bunch of messy, demanding feelings on him. To try to make this about… about more than just a bit of fucking between friends. There was another way to write what he meant, a blunter way. More honest. But Crowley didn’t think he could stand to see it on paper, even when he was the only one who would know. Instead he wrote, _“Never let him know how much it means.”_

Crowley read over the list again and again until he had memorized it. Then, he walked over to his window and pushed open the shutters. Light spilled in, and he squinted against the sun. A spark of Hellfire from his fingertips lit the paper in moments, and he held a corner of it as it burned to ash and blew out of the room into the street.

He really needed to find somewhere to stay that wasn’t such a shithole. Somewhere with better lighting. It had been a while since he kept plants, and he thought he might like having something living to yell at in the coming weeks besides himself. He could stay here for a few more days, maybe, until the idea of sleeping in the same room where they’d fucked became unbearable instead of appealing, and then he’d find somewhere else to be.

There was another rule, of course, one he hadn’t written down because he hadn’t needed to. It was what he’d always done, since the very beginning. The fact that he could touch Aziraphale now, maybe—something that had been against the rules for thousands of years—didn’t change it at all. If anything, it made it more urgent, since it seemed like the angel was determined to start taking massive personal risks these days. Fucking demons, trying to get himself killed by humans… no. Crowley knew that he would have to keep a closer eye on him. He laughed a little, then. Was the sex a pretext for it? Was it an excuse? It was certainly a way to stay close to him, which would make his job easier.

_Keep Aziraphale safe._ That was the rule behind everything else, the reason for every other rule on the list. And Crowley knew he needed to find some way to make that happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes (Historical, Linguistic, and Otherwise):**  
>  Shout out to Bucky for coming up with the name, “Mister Aziraphale Ziraphale Fell's Emporium of Antiquated and Rare Books, Volumes, and Parchments.” _”Carpe Librum,”_ at the risk of over explaining the joke, means “Seize the Book,” and someday I will go to one of the many IRL bookstores that has that name.
> 
> Because I’m a massive pedant, I’m required to tell you that the Library of Alexandria didn’t burn all at once in a tragic blaze. It had been in decline for a long time before Caesar got involved, and like Crowley hinted at, a lot of the stuff in the collection had copies in other places. Because I’m an asshole, I’m required to remind you of that Tumblr post (sorry, I cannot find the link because of that hellsite’s broken search function) explaining that if Aziraphale had hoarded scrolls from the first Library of Alexandria in his bookshop, then “it really did burn down, only two thousand years later and three thousand miles away.”
> 
> And now, a silly thing ft. my butchered understanding of French and middle schooler’s sense of humor.  
>  _Coup de foudre:_ thunderbolt, often used as an idiom to describe love at first sight.  
>  _Coup de foutre:_ cumshot.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> Y’all, I really tried to get a head start on chapter five, but it’s slow going. I will begin posting my stage thespian human AU for the Good AUmens event starting on June 11th (which is in six days, _**holy fuck**_ ) so even if this gets delayed again, that’s on the horizon.
> 
> Be safe out there. Take care of each other. Stand up for what you believe in and the world you want to live in.


	5. Good Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even with the lingering clouds, the sunlight that made it through the skylight bathed the upper level in a pale glow that set Crowley’s imagination racing. He could see the shelves the way Aziraphale had described them, heavy stacks of his favorites ringing the balcony, and somewhere up there, in some corner protected from view but still favored by the light… an armchair tucked away, perfect for dozing in the sun.
> 
> He had just gotten as far as debating whether or not some kind of ivy or other vine plant would be suited for running along the railings when he brought himself back to reality. _'This is his shop,'_ Crowley reminded himself. _'His home. Not yours.'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y’all. It’s been a minute. XD
> 
> **Content Notes** : Reference to historical plagues and wars (specifically, Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign.) Non-graphic in the text, but explained in slightly more detail in the historical endnote.
> 
> I… probably should have added the "anxiety" tag before now, oops. From this point on, anything more extreme than the _'Heigh ho! says Anthony Crowley, and promptly flings his penis off of his body and out of existence in a panic about his crush thinking his attraction to him is repulsive'_ scene in Chapter 1 will be getting a specific chapter-level warning, but just know Crowley is going to be working himself into knots basically the whole time.
> 
> Specific Sex Acts:  
> None, they wouldn’t stop talking to each other.  
> There is explicit-ish discussion of past and potential future sex acts, and Crowley has some thoughts about his own arousal, but on the whole, I’d rate this chapter M instead of E.  
> Crowley has a vulva this chapter. Aziraphale remains clothed for the whole time, so the only thing we know for sure that he has in his pants is his general zest for life.
> 
> In the last fic of this series, I offered y’all a song to pair with your fic reading experiences. To celebrate Aziraphale’s progress towards opening his bookshop, I would like to offer you [To Build a Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkP6Tf79UrM) by The Cinematic Orchestra.  
> This chapter’s title was partly inspired by another song, [The Bones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oODllqrxrLQ) by Maren Morris (ft. everyone’s favorite Hoziest boy), but uh… the tone of that song is a little more cheerful than what’s happening here, so… ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

**London, 1799**

Crowley had been in London again for nine days before he saw Aziraphale again. The first two of those days had been a bit of a mess, really, he was demon enough to admit that. Had any of his coworkers decided to check in on him, maybe helped him lug his massive fern up the stairs to his new Lambeth flat— _ha_ —Crowley would have explained that he was putting in some extra hours practicing his sloth and vanity. Perfectly reasonable demonic activity, all that lounging about and rearranging his furniture, trying to make it perfect. Chasing after a pointless, unattainable goal and slacking off on his real work at the same time. Very efficient.

Thankfully, none of his coworkers chose this moment to make the trip up to bother him, and in the privacy of his new lodgings, he was able to acknowledge to himself that what he was really experiencing was a rather intense bout of nerves.

Aziraphale was… here. Close enough that Crowley could feel him, closer than he’d been in the last six years. He could have sought him out straight away, but he waited. Not for Aziraphale to reach out first, no. He’d probably be waiting until Armageddon for that. But he wanted to give the angel time to notice that he was nearby, give him time to make up his mind about how their next meeting would go. He didn’t want to startle him.

After six years apart, those first two days felt like an almost impossible test of self-restraint. Luckily, Crowley was an expert in that by now. He hadn’t caved to temptation in those first few nights after they parted in Paris when he’d been sleeping in a room that smelled like Aziraphale, hadn’t caved the night the smell finally faded. He wasn’t about to cave now, not when he was so close to the possibility of success.

There had, of course, been close calls over the years. Times when his willpower was weak, often when he was lying on his back in whatever rooms he’d secured for himself that month, his skin still buzzing from a touch he pretended wasn’t his own. He’d have to close his eyes and breathe for a while, let himself calm down, remind himself of the rules. Only once his heartbeat had slowed, once his sweat had chilled and his come had gone all tacky, would he let himself clean away the mess by miracle. He didn’t trust himself in those moments. Crowley was a demon with a history of self-sabotage, and didn’t put it past his lust-addled lizard brain to try to pull a fast one when his guard was down. He had this fear, irrational though it was, that one time he’d slip up and that instead of banishing the evidence of another sad wank, he would instead banish himself from his lodgings and end up wherever the angel was, naked and sticky.

As his traitorous mind had regularly reminded him, he had not explicitly been told to stay away. He could find Aziraphale literally any time he wanted, which was often. Crowley knew, though, if he did this the right way—clothes on, not covered in demon spunk, potentially sending a note ahead of time instead of bending the fabric of reality to show up uninvited—Aziraphale might even be happy to see him. Of course, getting to London was never the problem. It was the staying. Aziraphale had given clear guidelines for this—this _thing_ that was apparently happening with them now. He had expressed his desire that their Arrangement continue without disruption, had asked that their meetings continue to be infrequent and to have the appearance of spontaneity, as they had for centuries now. It wouldn’t do to forget that and come on too strong, to make Aziraphale retreat back to the way things were before. Or, worse, to push him out of their Arrangement—out of Crowley’s life—altogether.

_Always have a pretext,_ he reminded himself. _Always have plausible deniability._ Until those two conditions were met, he knew he couldn’t risk trying to see the angel again.

It took six years before Crowley could find a reasonable excuse to set up lodgings in London again, an excuse that would both satisfy Aziraphale’s wishes and keep him looking busy enough that Hell wouldn’t be inclined to drag him somewhere else before he’d even gotten done unpacking the plants.

Finally, _finally_ on the morning of that third day, Crowley caved and sent a messenger to Aziraphale with a note, vague and unsigned as always. It included a date and time—one week out, mid-morning—and a single word, _“Lunch.”_

Crowley debated with himself about the merits of including a question mark at the end. He didn’t know which was more natural, which felt most like the Arrangement as it had been before everything changed. Would he have asked it as a question ten years ago? Fifty? Before he knew what Aziraphale’s lips tasted like, would he have simply demanded a meeting with his adversary? He remembered the days before the Arrangement when their meetings were unplanned, when Crowley offered no warning at all before appearing in Aziraphale’s life again for another handful of hours and leaving again just as abruptly.

In the end, Crowley added the question mark. He wanted Aziraphale to know that he could always say no.

The messenger returned two hours later with Aziraphale’s answer. Vague, unsigned, brief, just like always. An address for a restaurant in Soho, written in that same delicate handwriting he knew he could pick out of a lineup of thousands. Crowley held the card in his hand for a full minute before burning it down to ash.

The next seven days, by comparison, passed in a blur.  


* * *

  
Crowley saw him first through the café window, a pale shape moving through the downpour pelting the grey and sodden streets of Soho. He heard his voice a moment after the door shut.

“Good morning, Miss Green!”

“Goodness, Mr. Fell! Here, let me fetch you a towel.”

Aziraphale's laugh was rich and resonant, and it hit Crowley all at once, the full extent of just how much he had missed the angel in the years they’d been apart.

“Ghastly weather,” he said, and Crowley could _hear_ the smile from all the way in the other room. “It's as if the heavens opened up.”

Crowley fiddled with his newspaper while he waited, considering the facts. Aziraphale had called the human by her name, and she had addressed him with his alias. That probably meant Aziraphale was known here, then. This place must be a favorite. He'd picked a meeting place he probably wanted to return to later, knowing he would be meeting Crowley. A place he was willing to be seen with him, at least by humans, potentially more than once.

In that case, it seemed unlikely that he'd be wanting to pretend that they were strangers. Probably best to assume they’d be doing the business associates bit, or _possibly_ playing at being old school chums, though that one might be pushing it. He'd wait for Aziraphale to say something first and follow along with any back story he'd invented for these humans.

By the time Aziraphale entered the dining room, Crowley had already paused his heartbeat so it wouldn't betray him. He stayed collected and still as he watched Aziraphale pat dry his hair—plastered to his forehead and dark from the rain—and pass the towel back to the café human who’d shown him in. There was no incriminating blush as Aziraphale turned and saw him, no audible thumping of his ridiculous heart as the angel looked around the room and gave him a small, secretive smile. No. Crowley was the portrait of aloof disinterest as Aziraphale approached their table.

“Mr. Crowley,” he said simply, nodding.

Business associates, then.

“Mr. Fell,” Crowley responded. “Have a seat.” He gestured vaguely with his folded his newspaper at the three empty chairs at their table. Aziraphale chose the one opposite him, as he'd expected, but he'd wanted to leave the choice open.

He granted himself perhaps half of a second to commit the image of Aziraphale, sodden and pouting, to memory, then put a hand to his temple to check the room. There were perhaps six other diners present, plus the employee, and at the moment he saw that their attention was all away from their table, Crowley flicked his fingers in the angel's direction. All of the water that had soaked into his hair and clothing evaporated away into steam.

Aziraphale beamed and softly spoke Crowley's name in a voice that drizzled over him like warm honey.

“Can’t have you looking like you drowned,” he grumbled, finally, after spending a moment trying to swallow around nothing.

“No, of course not,” Aziraphale answered, the smile slow to fade even as the girl arrived to get their orders.

While the angel’s attention was with the human, Crowley took the opportunity to get a better look at his now-dry companion. Any change in Aziraphale’s appearance was noteworthy, and it seemed as though he had secured himself a whole new persona in the six years since he’d seen him last in Paris. There were no dramatic departures from his usual sartorial choices, of course, nothing veering from his safe creams and beiges and blues, but it _was_ different. Less applique, less lace, less sparkle. Fabrics that were thicker—warm against the late autumn chill, yes, but also more durable. Nothing shiny, no satins or silks, everything looked... plush. He wasn't pretending to be a noble here, an _aristo_ , no one with any overt power. Aziraphale looked the part of a man with a trade, one that kept him well-fed and comfortable. A man who worked with his hands, yes, but more so with his mind. A man who did not come home with calluses on his fingers.

“Anything interesting in your paper?” Aziraphale asked, spreading his napkin in his lap. Crowley realized as he looked down at his own hands that he was still holding the newspaper, practically strangling it, really, as it was now rolled up in his fist in a tight little tube.

“I doubt it. Nothing an upstanding gentleman such as yourself would find interesting,” Crowley answered. He smoothed it out and folded it, hiding the frayed edge where he'd been picking at it, then tucked it and his pencil away in an inside pocket of his coat. “Absolute drivel, nothing but salacious gossip and petty crime.”

It was true. He would have bet money that half the rubbish printed in it was completely fictional. He was, in fact, betting something a bit more valuable—namely, his hide—that Dagon wouldn't be able to tell the difference if he padded his paperwork with some of the headlines he'd underlined.

“What brings you to London?” Aziraphale asked delicately. “Anything I should be concerned about?”

Crowley drummed his fingertips on the surface of the table. “Coal,” he said after a moment. “Other things, too, but that’s what’s going to run it. Factories popping up like mushrooms. Easy pickings for greed. Upstairs is going to need to pick up the pace if they want to stay competitive. Everything’s getting streamlined and mass-produced, even sin.”

There was a crease in Aziraphale’s brow as he pondered his next words. Eventually, he seemed to settle on something and said, “That seems like an assignment with a lot of wiggle room.”

“I think they’re starting to come around to my style of things. Large scale meddling instead of wasting time on one-on-one jobs.” Crowley shrugged, then lowered his voice. “Besides, they’ve been pleased with me this decade. Might even get a commendation at this rate.”

The crease deepened. “Whatever for?”

“You heard of Bonaparte?”

_“Have I heard of Bonaparte?”_ Aziraphale repeated, his eyes going a bit wide. “Of course, I’ve—which part of that was you?”

“Officially, all of it.” Crowley pressed his lips into a thin line. Wars were some of his least favorite assignments, especially when Pestilence decided to tag along. He’d never been one for opium, really, but after Egypt, he found that the smell of it was nauseating. “But between you and me, all I really did was say, _it’s a bit hot, here, isn’t it? I bet France is nice this time of year._ Next thing you know he was sailing back home and starting a coup.”

Their lunch was something like familiar ground. Shop talk first—straightforward assignments, not likely to be in conflict—then time spent catching up. Though he would not admit it, Crowley knew that Aziraphale had an appetite for drama and intrigue, and Crowley aimed to provide. Mentally combing through their time spent apart, Crowley chose the stories he shared deliberately and carefully. He picked out ones that would suitably scandalize the angel and have him make those round-mouthed faces of shock over the rim of his teacup. Ones that would have him struggling not to laugh. He left out the stories that would be likely to actually horrify Aziraphale, to disappoint or disgust him.

Aziraphale, for his part, seemed to have become rather embedded in the Soho neighborhood since he’d arrived, more than Crowley had ever seen him when he’d stayed other places. He talked at animated length about the various coffee houses, restaurants, and literary organizations he’d become familiar with over the past six years. In the scheme of lives like theirs, he hadn’t been here long at all, but Crowley could already tell that Aziraphale was enjoying the role he played here, enjoyed being Mr. Fell the book collector, and, of course, the people here liked him, too. It felt natural seeing him here, like the angel had found in Soho a place to fit into like a missing teacup in a set. Crowley idly wondered if the neighborhood had always existed like this, so naturally in line with Aziraphale’s tastes, or if it had warped itself around the angel until it became the kind of place he wanted to live.

He thought Aziraphale had looked happy talking about his new habitat. Then, Crowley asked Aziraphale about the bookshop, and the smile he got in response was almost blinding.

“Oh, you simply _must_ come see it,” he said, and the crinkles at the corner of his eyes made Crowley’s mostly decorative heart ache in his chest. “It isn’t much yet, and it needs work. I’m estimating at least half a year before I’m ready to open to the public, but the building is exactly what I was hoping for.”

“Oh yeah?” Crowley prompted, sitting back in his chair. He didn’t say much for quite a while after that, instead supplying positive-sounding noises whenever Aziraphale paused in his retelling of all the minutiae of dramas and joys he’d experienced since purchasing his very first permanent base of Earthly operations.

In Crowley’s private opinion, it sounded to him like the Archangels had handed Aziraphale something that was barely more than a ruin, with a badly-damaged roof and warped floors from flooding, though Aziraphale preferred to gush about the building’s potential and how he’d seen, right from the beginning, that it had “good bones.” Most of it had been fixed up the mundane way, with money and time. Aziraphale spoke with a voice that all but trembled with excitement of the work done by his glaziers and carpenters and crafts-humans of every description. He also spoke in whispers of getting permission for divine modifications, of weaving wards into the bricks and stretching the space within to suit his needs.

Crowley spared a moment’s thought to worry that, with that many blessings concentrated in one spot, the interior of the shop might be a little too holy for him to enter. He dismissed the idea as unlikely. Aziraphale seemed like he had his heart set on giving a tour after lunch and he doubted that the angel would have consecrated the place and forgotten to mention it. He supposed he’d find out soon enough after walking inside, though.

The other thing Aziraphale wanted to talk about, of course, were stories about wheedling books out of other collectors’ hands. There were more of those than usual, too, as Aziraphale had recently been granted permission to stock a whole shop with his finds and, as a result, had all but been unleashed like a force of nature upon an unsuspecting literary world. That topic was enough to carry them all the way through their rather languid lunch, and Crowley fought a grin through the whole conversation. Stories about book procurement tended to be some of his favorites due to the sheer potential for chaos. All pretense of angelic goodness was forgotten when a human had a first edition Aziraphale wanted, especially if he thought that they weren’t appreciating their book enough according to his ridiculous standards.

It was a few minutes after the café human had come back to take away their plates and ply them with pound cake that some thought seemed to shake Aziraphale out of his chatty, bubbly mood. He trailed to a stop, looking uncertain and embarrassed.

“Listen to me, prattling on,” he said, laughing uncomfortably. “You really must stop me when I get like this, my dear boy. I’m sure I’ve bored you half out of your mind.”

Crowley swallowed down his mouthful of cake. “I’ll let you know when you bore me,” he said, knowing full well that such a thing hadn’t happened yet and never would. “Now, go on. You were telling me about how you blackmailed someone on the Court of Aldermen into giving you his illustrated manuscript of _The Canterbury Tales.”_

_“Crowley,”_ Aziraphale chided. “It was not _blackmail.”_

In Crowley’s more expert opinion, it absolutely was, but that was neither here nor there. All Crowley cared about was listening to him talk and, on occasion, teasing him without mercy. _Bored._ What an absolute load of bollocks. Even at his most dry and repetitive, hearing Aziraphale talk about something that made his eyes light up like that could never be _boring._ Even when Crowley had no idea what the devil Aziraphale was on about, when he was too drunk to follow along and tuned some of his words out to background noise, Crowley was never _bored._ Calmed, sometimes. Soothed, even. But never _bored._

“Right, sure. He sounded like a tosser though.” Crowley passed his plate across the table, half of his slice of cake uneaten. “Want the rest of mine?”

Aziraphale hesitated over it for a moment, then gave in. “Alright, then. Wouldn’t want it going to waste.” Crowley watched a forkful disappear into his mouth, watched the way the angel closed his eyes. Brushed a thumb across the pink of his bottom lip chasing a crumb. “And you’re right. He was a bit of a boor.”

“This place does a good pound cake.” Crowley observed, placid, as he focused with intent on the grain of the tabletop.

“I’m happy to see you enjoyed it. They also do a rather remarkable gingerbread,” Aziraphale said, giving one of those ruinous little happy wiggles in his seat. “The next time we come here I hope you’ll try some. I remembered you being partial to it.”

“Gingerbread,” Crowley repeated, his mind still reeling with the thought of _‘next time’_ and all that that might mean. “Yeah. Sure.”

_“Blackmail,”_ Aziraphale scoffed, seemingly unaware of the giddy, squirmy thing happening to Crowley’s insides. “Really, Crowley, you do have a scoundrel’s imagination sometimes. It was my angelic duty to inform the man that his bribe-taking was not the secret he thought it was. If he happened to see the error of his ways more than once that night, and he _happened_ to decide to rehome a historically significant text in dreadful need of delicate handling, that’s hardly blackmail.”

Crowley laughed, feeling light and buoyant. They were together again after six long years, in a Soho café with rain pattering on the window near their table, and Aziraphale was happy enough that he wanted to come back. Wanted there to be a _next time._ Wanted to show Crowley all of the little things about this place that he found dear—his bookshop, his ill-gotten Chaucer, the gingerbread at a café where they knew him well enough to greet him by his name—and Crowley wanted to see absolutely all of it.

He was in love. Had been for longer than he remembered, but this time instead of aching with it, instead of it sitting inside him like a stone and weighing him down, he felt like he was floating on it. It took everything he had not to reach across the table to where Aziraphale was sitting and kiss him silly. Taste the sweetness of the cake on his lips.

And maybe he’d even get to. Not here, of course. Somewhere hidden. Somewhere secret. He still didn’t understand what he’d done to have such luck, that after centuries of wanting from a distance Aziraphale had decided he wanted Crowley’s lips, his hands, wanted to touch him and be touched in return. Just the notion that it was a _possibility_ now was dizzying.

It was almost too easy to talk to Aziraphale. The attraction was still there, of course, as it always was. The memories of their last shag lurked just below the surface, as he’d expected. Especially as once again, Crowley experienced that old familiar torture that he would only be able to put a name to a century later, after a bloke in Russia proved that the same thing that happened to his cunt when he watched Aziraphale eat cake could happen when you ring a bell around a trained dog.

But, remarkably, he found that it was bearable. Long before they’d ever fucked, they’d been friends. And they’d become friends for a _reason._ The angel was fun to talk to, and clever, and with centuries worth of old jokes to drag up, even though they were in public and utterly sober, Crowley couldn’t help himself but laugh. He stopped thinking about the proper way to be around the angel now that things had changed between them, stopped worrying and doubting for just a few minutes, and just… enjoyed being here with him. For the first time since he’d realized he was going to be back in London again, he stopped overthinking everything and let himself relax.

Crowley hadn't noticed when it had happened. His hand was on the tabletop, palm up and empty, almost all the way over out of his space and into Aziraphale's. Like he was reaching for him. _Waiting_ for him to reach back, to meet him in that middle and hold on to him in front of everyone.

He didn't know how long his hand had been there, but he did know that Aziraphale had seen it. He watched the discomfort pinch in his expression, watched the angel's eyes flick between the hand, the door, and the ceiling. The animated motion of Aziraphale's own hands had stilled, and he tucked them back down into his lap and out of sight.

Crowley, to his credit, played it cool. He lost a word on purpose and wiggled those fingers around as he searched for it, grasping at nothing like some pale and dying spider on its back. A stalling gesture. An excuse, weak as it was, for why he'd left his hand there. Why he'd let it reach for something it couldn't take.

He didn't think Aziraphale bought his hasty cover-up. He felt fairly confident, in fact, that Aziraphale had seen the mistake for what it was: something that came dangerously close to crossing a boundary, to bringing something that should be a secret out into public view. To putting them both in danger. But whether he believed Crowley or not, Aziraphale let it drop. He smiled again and sipped his tea, and Crowley took the out he was offered with both hands. Literally, wrapping both of the idiot things around his own teacup so he could keep an eye on them.

_Don't ever touch him in public,_ he scolded himself, committing it to memory. Adding another rule to the list, one that had always been there, but one he apparently needed to be reminded hadn’t changed since Paris.

They kept talking after that for a while, continuing to swap anecdotes and opinions, but Crowley would have had to have worked hard to ignore the way things had shifted after that moment. It wasn’t _easy_ anymore. There was tension between them now, palpable and sharp and present beneath every word and gesture. Eager for an escape, Crowley paid the bill soon after and let Aziraphale lead him through the streets of Soho.

At some point while they’d been in the café it had stopped raining, and Crowley didn’t know if that was down to one of them letting their power shape the weather or if it was all coincidence. Still, by the time they walked outside the heavy, pelting downpour had been reduced to a weak drizzle, barely more than mist. Droplets of water clung to Aziraphale’s hair, shiny in the diffuse light like tiny little stars.

He kept his distance, staying close enough to talk, close enough to be able to hear what Aziraphale saying, but not close enough to bump his shoulder or knock hands. He kept those hands of his in fists in his pockets. Safe. Secured.

It was a strange thing to consider. They were... they'd fucked. He'd been _inside_ Aziraphale. Aziraphale had been inside _him._ But somehow, it felt like the greater intimacy, the thing so tantalizingly out of reach, was holding the angel's hand on top of a table in a café at lunch.

He could perhaps ask Aziraphale to hold his hand later, once they were inside this bookshop of his. Out of the public eye. It seemed like some kind of a miracle that he could even consider asking for things like that now. How long had he wanted such simple touches? How long had he convinced himself that it would never be possible?

The idea of asking was… terrifying. His mind supplied him with hundreds of scenarios for how even such a simple thing as that could go terribly wrong. He kept his mouth shut and his hands in his pockets even as Aziraphale stuck an arm out for them to stop, hand fluttering in the general vicinity of Crowley’s shoulder—not touching, never touching, _not in public_ —and gave him a smile that almost hid the fragile thing behind it. Not brittle, no, but something new and blooming that Crowley knew he could never allow to be crushed.

“Here we are,” Aziraphale said, gesturing with open palms.

The bookshop was across the street from them, right on the corner, surrounded by scaffolding. There was no signage yet that he could see, and if Aziraphale hadn’t pointed the building out Crowley might have walked straight past it. He realized after a moment that he’d been expecting something much more blatantly… Heavenly. Something like one of those obnoxious little decorative ruins rich people liked to put on the grounds of their estates, all imposing marble and towering columns. Something that could easily be confused for a small cathedral, or maybe a bank.

This was not anything like that. This was subdued and subtle, a close match to the other shops surrounding it. Sophisticated without being flashy. It was only two levels but from where they were standing Crowley could make out what seemed to be part of a shallow dome peeking out from the top of the roof. Big windows on either side, all papered over. There were columns, yes, but only two, a pair in the Tuscan style holding up the portico that shielded the front door from the rain.

It wasn’t in Aziraphale’s typical color scheme, and he thought belatedly that that was probably another part of why he had overlooked it. He’d trained himself over the years to notice white and cream, gold and blue, and this didn’t fit that pattern. Although the upstairs was a clean beige brick, the ground floor had been painted a dark, rich red. Not quite oxblood, more like wine… alright, so maybe it was a bit truer to Aziraphale’s tastes than he’d originally thought.

The longer he looked at it, though, the more he could see Aziraphale in it. How he had shaped the bookshop to his persona of “Mr. Fell, bookseller” … or perhaps it had happened the other way around. Crowley knew that the average human would only see an empty building, one that was being worked on, perhaps, but still a bit shabby in places. Maybe they would even notice its potential, the “good bones” that had drawn Aziraphale to it. Crowley, however, saw the angel’s fingerprints all over it. He recognized the trace of his miracles, felt them flowing through the foundations and down into the earth. If he looked at it sideways, let his eyes slip out of focus, he could see the way it shimmered with power, the way it seemed like it wasn’t really a part of reality. A tiny snag in the fabric of space that was easy to overlook. A place that Aziraphale had claimed and indelibly marked as his own.

He realized that Aziraphale was watching him look, waiting for him to respond. “S’good. Good location. It’s very, um…” he trailed off. Clearing his throat, he finished rather lamely, “… very you.”

Apparently, that had been the right thing to say, based on the way Aziraphale’s hesitant expression broke into pure radiance. He hurried them both across the street, carriages slowing with preternatural convenience to let them pass.

There was still something nervous about the way he moved, the way he checked over his shoulder and up at the cloudy sky. How he fumbled for his keys before he put them in the lock. Fear, yes… but also excitement. Crowley hung back, trying not to crowd him, and pretended he was checking his watch. The sound of his name, barely a whisper, caught his attention and he looked up to find Aziraphale had already vanished inside. The door was left ajar for him to follow.

Even with his earlier worries about accidental consecrations and the sheer number of bloody miracles that seemed to have been baked into the architecture, Crowley did not hesitate before he stepped across the threshold. To his surprise, the shop didn’t hesitate to let him in, either. He felt the wards open around him, their divine magic never touching him, felt the protective spells Aziraphale had woven like a net across the doorway shift and make room for him to slip through. It was like a hand had reached out and parted a curtain to let him inside this secret, protected place—no, it was more than being let in. It felt like being welcomed, and as far as he could tell, Aziraphale had done nothing just now to suppress the barrier to allow a demon to cross his threshold. It felt like…

…like he’d never been someone the barrier had been intended to keep out.

Aziraphale was waiting for him in the entranceway and he leaned in quite close to Crowley once he had gotten inside. The urge to reach out and touch him was overwhelming, and he was _right there_ , his eyes watching Crowley’s face as he reached around behind him to lock the door.

Crowley froze.

There was a part of him, small and pathetic though it was, that had held on to the irrational hope that he would discover Aziraphale to be just as eager as he himself was. That he would barely make it through the bookshop door before clothes started coming off, that he would find himself pressed into a wall by barely contained angelic might and snogged within an inch of his infernal life. He knew it was a ridiculous thought, but that relentless little streak of optimism in him had been whispering to him since Aziraphale declined to touch him in the café, telling him that the tension that had stretched between them had been _desire._ Not discomfort, not disgust, not even fear, but something that echoed that cavernous, wanting place inside himself. Something that longed for closeness and touch even if it wasn’t the same thing as love.

For a maddening moment, Crowley thought that he might have been right. Thought that he had seen the angel’s eyes drop to his lips.

But then Aziraphale stepped away, hands gripping each other behind his back. Crowley’s hands stayed in his pockets. Any thought he might have still been harboring of reaching out for Aziraphale shriveled up and died.

_Touching,_ he told himself, amending his earlier rule and underlining the phrase in his mind, _is only for during sex._

He followed Aziraphale away from the door and onto what would someday be his shop floor. It was dim inside, though the newspaper in the windows was too thin to truly darken the place, muted sunlight bleeding through the pages and turning the cloudy afternoon daylight outside into something closer to dusk. The shop was cavernously baren, nothing in it save for a spiral staircase and a cluster of four columns in the center of the room. A faint smell of sawdust and paint lingered in the air.

The angel had told him over lunch that he’d had the building for almost five weeks now, and that so far what he had managed to do was to replace the roof and the floors and to have the exterior painted. An image came to mind of Aziraphale standing here in this empty room at night, just waiting for morning to arrive.

_Does he sleep here?_ Crowley found himself wondering, then realized he didn’t know if Aziraphale even slept. He mentally corrected himself. _Is this where he’s staying? There’s no furniture, not even a chair…_

He wanted to ask if Aziraphale had other lodgings or if the Archangels had just approved the purchase and left him to figure out the rest. A more impulsive part of him wanted to ask Aziraphale if he wanted to stay with him in his own lodgings, the ones with the rickety stairs and his massive fern and the smell of the Thames seeping in under the door.

Instead, he forced himself to watch the distance Aziraphale maintained between them as he led the tour, and in doing so caught sight of the bone white symbols painted on the floor between the columns: a circle, complex and squiggly and writ with holy power.

“So,” Crowley said, carefully toeing around the sigil and taking in the look of the empty space around them. “This is it, then? Your… Heavenly headquarters while on Earth.”

Aziraphale glanced down at the circle with a grimace. “It’s harmless when it’s not activated, but. Ah. I thought, perhaps… A rug might be a good choice.”

“What? Don’t fancy explaining to the humans why you have some wonky arts-and-crafts project in the middle of your shop floor?”

_“Wonky?”_ With a little indignant wiggle, Aziraphale squared his shoulders. “I’ll have you know I was the one who drew that.”

Crowley stared at him. “So why did you stick it right in the way of everything like that? I imagine you won’t be able to keep any shelves there, not if you don’t want your books vaporized the first time Michael or someone decides to ring you up.”

“I wasn’t given input on… placement,” he said, flicking his eyes upwards. “I was told it needed to be… _in the sight of Heaven,_ as it were.”

“Right. Of course. Well…” Crowley took a step back, noticing the skylight set into the dome overhead and watching it warily. “Can I—should I—?”

Aziraphale’s voice was crisp and dispassionate, but there was a tension in the way he held his body. Not nerves, no… but an energy, nevertheless. “The way I understood it… it’s supposed to be, ah. Well. One-way.”

“One-way?”

“It’s for… if I’m ever in need of. Of _guidance,_ I suppose. Or—or if I need to go Upstairs. I have a way close by.” There was a quirk to his lips then, something self-satisfied that he tried to tamp down on, but the benefit of always paying attention was that there wasn’t much Aziraphale did that Crowley missed. “I explained to my colleagues that if this was to be a working establishment—as its front, of course, a cover for its _true role_ —there were going to be humans coming and going fairly regularly. We would need to take care to not let our celestial nature become… obvious. And of course, someone appearing in the middle of a Soho shop in a beam of light would necessitate quite a few miracles to modify memories and so forth. Get the scorch marks off the floorboards. _Frivolous miracles,_ I’m told, are things we are supposed to be avoiding at the moment.”

As Aziraphale spoke, Crowley felt a swell of pride and affection swelling within him… not to mention the strangest feeling of growing comfort in this space. He tentatively prodded the sigil with the toe of his boot and found there was no reaction. It was as inert as the rest of the bookshop floor.

_Clever bastard…_

“So, you convinced them to leave you alone here?”

The angel bit his lip. “I introduced the Archangels to the concept of a front door.”

Satan, but he could have kissed him. Could have stepped right across that sigil between them and snogged him until they both fell over with it. He held himself back from doing anything physical, but there wasn’t a thing he could have done to stop that fond, soppy grin from spreading across his face.

“So. What now, angel?” he drawled, cocking his head.

Aziraphale went very pink in the face and turned away, waving a hand at the papered-over windows. “The, ah. The glazier, I think. They’re coming by tomorrow to work.” He cleared his throat. “Upstairs, first. Then… then the windows at the front.”

“Right,” Crowley said, nodding. He stayed right where he was as the angel began to bustle around the space, flustered and pointing at things.

Crowley actually had, in fact, been asking after the shop, but Aziraphale must have interpreted his question differently at first… and while he had shied away, he hadn’t look shocked. Hadn’t looked unhappy. The blushing and the deflection and the nerves weren’t _unfamiliar_ reactions from Aziraphale, but in the aftermath of their… their _whatever_ they were doing that apparently included the potential for shagging now, Crowley looked at them with new eyes. Was this… was this attraction? Was Aziraphale as lost as he was at how to do this?

He understood that he himself was feeling uncertain and off-balance about this visit, the first one they’d had since they decided to keep having sex _on purpose_ instead of just colliding together in the dark and fumbling for their pleasure. If anything happened today, it would be… premeditated. And he didn’t know how to go about starting it. Didn’t know how to make the leap from tea and cake and talk of water damaged floors to—to taking off that cravat with his teeth, or… or dropping to his knees, or getting those arms around him. It occurred to him that maybe… maybe Aziraphale didn’t know either. They were friends, they had known one another since the Earth was formed. They were familiar. But maybe that familiarity was what was making things feel so strained now? There were patterns they lived in, ways they’d trained themselves to behave. Those were hard to break.

He knew Aziraphale could be the bold one when he wanted to be. When he was ready. If he was going to be ready. If he hadn’t changed his mind in the last six years and decided it wasn’t worth the risk… but even if that were the case, he clearly still wanted Crowley around. Had invited him here, into his home, into his wards. Whatever this visit would turn out to be, Crowley knew he was willing to wait for Aziraphale to show him what to do.

“When are you getting the books in?” He asked, leaning back against one of the columns. His hands were starting to get clammy in his pockets, and he gave his heart a silent warning to get its act together if it didn’t want to get shut off again, but he was used to acting calm when he was on edge. Adapting to new and confusing situations was a requirement for life on Earth, not to mention for staying in one piece Downstairs.

Something like relief washed over Aziraphale’s expression, something like settling back onto familiar ground. He adjusted his waistcoat, smoothing over wrinkles that weren’t there, but there was a soft crinkling at the corners of his eyes that hinted at a growing smile.

“Soon. As you were so willing to tease me for over lunch, I’ve already begun making inquiries of local collectors. I’ve also made contact with a few London publishing houses to see about purchasing new works. And as you know, I had a rather expansive personal collection already…” He was animated as he spoke, that uncertainty fading from his body language as he laughed at himself, and Crowley was transfixed. “In fact, I’m afraid I may have gotten a bit ahead of myself with that. I haven’t anywhere to put them yet.”

“I did notice a shocking lack of shelving when I arrived.”

“I’ve placed orders for the bookshelves, they should be arriving early this coming week,” Aziraphale said, walking in a broad arc around the outside of the columns towards the front doors. Closer to where Crowley stood. “I thought, perhaps… one row of them over—over here. And then… well, there’s a _lovely_ mezzanine that I thought would be perfect for the books less suited for browsing by the public.”

As he talked, Aziraphale gestured up towards the balcony and Crowley followed the motion with his eyes. Even with the lingering clouds, the sunlight that made it through the skylight bathed the upper level in a pale glow that set Crowley’s imagination racing. He could see the shelves the way Aziraphale had described them, heavy stacks of his favorites ringing the balcony, and somewhere up there, in some corner protected from view but still favored by the light… an armchair tucked away, perfect for dozing in the sun.

He had just gotten as far as debating whether or not some kind of ivy or other vine plant would be suited for running along the railings when he brought himself back to reality. _This is his shop,_ Crowley reminded himself. _His home. Not yours._

“Right. Yeah. I think you’ve got a plan here.” He risked letting one of his hands out of its pocket prison to scratch the slight stubble at his chin. “You know… I don’t think I’ve seen your whole hoard all in one place before.”

“You haven’t.” Aziraphale rocked on the balls of his feet. He was only about a foot or two away now, practically at arm’s reach. “Nor have I. This will be the first time. I’ve been having my things shipped here from… from all the places I’ve kept them.”

“You sure it’ll all fit?”

“It will.” Aziraphale looked around the room with a confidence that seemed to suggest that he would bend the fabric of space until it did. “But you should see the storage room. It’s an absolute disaster at the moment.”

“Lead the way,” Crowley said, straightening up off the column in one long shrug.

“You don’t… it isn’t anything terribly exciting,” Aziraphale hedged, acting as though he hadn’t expected Crowley to take it literally, though he’d already begun walking towards the back of the shop. “It’s nothing more than dusty antiques. You needn’t pretend to be interested.”

“The same could be said about us, angel. I’m older than anything you have in a box back there.” He raised his eyebrows. “‘Sides, I’m curious to see what you’ve decided to keep. I was probably there when you got it. Maybe I’m in the mood for a bit of nostalgia.”

“You just want to snoop.”

Crowley put a hand over his heart, feigning insult. “I was going to offer to help you sort through your things, angel. That’s what people do when a friend moves house, isn’t it?”

Aziraphale shot him a look as he led them through an archway into another empty side room. “I believe most people offer to help move the things in, not to rifle through their boxes after all the hard work is finished.”

“Hard work?” He scoffed. “I know you hired humans for it.”

Aziraphale ignored him. “Or they bring a housewarming present.”

“Looks like I buggered up the etiquette, then. What do you want? Wine? I can get wine.”

“I have wine.” The angel opened a door and revealed a room full of stacked wooden crates, his eyes roving over shipping labels written in different languages. He pointed at one with _‘Fragile—Vino’_ stamped onto the side, two other crates stacked on top of it. “Though it _is_ only just past two o’clock. I think it might be a touch early in the day to start working on getting soused, mm?”

While Aziraphale had been speaking, Crowley’s attention had been drawn to a corner of the room where a makeshift sitting area had been established. One crate was supporting a small stack of books, a candle, and a teacup. The one beside it, just a bit lower to the ground, had a few cushions resting on top. Crowley felt a flicker of rage ignite in him and bit the inside of his cheek to keep it in check.

Aziraphale had been living in London, he knew, since he’d been ordered here in early 1792. Seven years now, nearly eight. He must have had other lodgings during that time. He always did, that was how both of their sides operated when they gave out assignments. But here, he was staying in an empty, half-finished shop without any furniture. He’d been fighting to get this bookshop, a permanent home, for most of the decade—something that was, from what Crowley could tell, an unnecessarily complex and stressful process, and one that… fuck. He’d been telling the truth, hadn’t he? In Paris, when he’d said Heaven had told him to cut back on the miracles… and here he was, in late ’99, apparently still not in the clear to make his space more comfortable now that he had it.

The only conclusion that he could come to was that five weeks ago, Heaven had handed Aziraphale a damaged building and told him to move in. Taken away his other lodgings. Left him here like it was _fine_ , because he was an angel who didn’t need sleep or comfort or anything approximating a home, like he needed nothing more involved than an empty shell to wait out the night in out of sight of the humans. And, if he knew Aziraphale’s bosses as well as he thought he did, he’d guess that they also acted like he should be grateful to finally have this silly shop he’d been asking them for all this time.

“Right,” he said, snapping his fingers. The lamp hanging above the door flared to life and bathed the windowless storage room in an amber glow. “Fuck the wine. You’re getting a chair.”

“It’s quite alright, I’m having my first shipment of furniture delivered Thursday, just as soon as the shelves are installed.”

Crowley shrugged, waving a hand. A plush armchair popped into existence inside the storage room, an atrocious cream number he hated but knew Aziraphale would love, quickly followed by a spindly end table.

“Crowley! Where did you get this from?” Aziraphale gasped, crossing the threshold to examine the upholstery. “This is a real chair, something a human made. You can’t just go around stealing people’s furniture!”

“Consider it a loaner, then. Until you get your shipment in.” He nudged the chair back an inch or so with a wave of his hand, straightening it relative to the table. “I got it from your Alderman friend. You can give it back once he’s turned a new leaf or what have you.”

“...That’s as may be, but it is still stolen goods,” Aziraphale said, still eyeing the chair. He was using that old familiar tone of voice that indicated that he was mostly over whatever wrongdoing he was currently wringing his hands over, but would still require further persuasion before letting himself fully accept it. “Besides, he'll miss it.”

He leaned against the door frame. “Nah. Not until summer, at least. Took it from his country estate, no one's living there except his staff right now, and you can bet they're not allowed to sit on this thing. You've got until May at the earliest to make sure it finds its way back there.”

Aziraphale ran a hand along the back of the chair. “…will you send it back if I asked you to?”

“Of course. I'm not going to force you to keep it.”

“Would you be willing to come by again on Thursday and make sure it gets home safely? In the evening, perhaps, after the movers have left?”

Crowley opened and closed his mouth. He wasn't even certain what was going to happen with the current visit, and he was already being invited back. In less than a week.

“Sure,” he said, finally. “But you know this means I'll have to think of something else to bring by. Since you're not keeping this one.”

“Is it too much to ask that it be legally obtained?” In response, Crowley shot him a wolfish grin and, seemingly in spite of himself, Aziraphale looked amused. “Well, come in if you’d like. There isn’t much to see in here, but you don’t have to linger in the doorway.”

Crowley stalked into the storage room and arranged himself on top of one of the crates across from the armchair, cross-legged and slouching. Aziraphale hesitated for a moment, then allowed himself to sit as well. Crowley watched as he settled in, made himself comfortable. Shame the angel was so uptight about the theft. That ugly little chair really did look like it belonged here.

“When I got your note, I considered… waiting. To invite you, I mean,” Aziraphale began, and Crowley’s stomach clenched. “Nothing’s ready yet. Upstairs, especially. I’m to have a flat, assuming everything works out with the paperwork. But it seems a bit embarrassing, trying to entertain when you can’t even offer your guest a seat. A proper one, I mean.”

His nerves faded quickly, first into relief and then into annoyance. And then maybe something like sadness, tinged of course with still more anger at the Archangels. Crowley pinched the bridge of his nose. Had he really… had Aziraphale actually picked up on Crowley’s mood and thought it was directed at him?

“You do remember I’ve stayed in caves before, right? And that terrible little leaky tent in Wessex?” He gestured around the room. “This is warm and dry and has the potential to be monstrously twee and cozy once you’ve had your way with it. I’m happy you let me come over.”

He’d said the last part before he’d had a chance to think it over or stop himself, so it escaped his mouth sounding entirely too sincere, the irritation in his tone doing little to disguise how he actually felt. He spared a thought for the fear that it might have been too much, but Aziraphale looked… pleased, even as he ducked his head, that soft roll under his chin making an appearance over the top of his high collar. Crowley wanted to kiss it. Instead, he shifted on top of the crate and slapped the top of his legs, hoping to escape that strange little moment of emotional honesty.

“Right, then,” he declared. “Why don’t you show me this book you rescued? You said it was illustrated, I want to see what they did for _The Friar’s Tale._ They always draw the demon funny and I’m in the mood for a laugh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical Note:** Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt was… pretty brutal, very much full of the kind of cruelty and colonial greed that Hell would likely be interested in and Crowley would hate. It was also a very plaguey campaign, and many of the French troops who were lost died of disease rather than in battle. Crowley’s distaste for the smell of opium is a reference to an event in 1798 where Napoleon ordered that some of his men who were dying of plague to be poisoned with opium so that the army could retreat faster.
> 
> While there is no specific date for this scene, I placed it sometime in mid to late November 1799, after Napoleon returned to France from Egypt and took over the government as First Consul via a coup. Crowley rode the success* of that venture right across the Channel and bought himself time to start working mischief during the emerging Industrial Revolution.
> 
> Pavlov didn’t do his experiment with conditioning dogs until 1902, but what is Good Omens besides an excuse to make anachronistic sex jokes?
> 
> _The Friar’s Tale:_ one of the stories in Geoffrey Chaucer’s _The Canterbury Tales._ It seemed thematically appropriate to include given that it’s about a corrupt official trying to extort bribes and getting supernatural comeuppance instead. In brief, a demon goes with a priest as he tries to scam a widow by claiming she owes him money (and her new frying pan, because he’s a dick) for getting (fake) adultery charges against her dropped. The widow refuses and damns the priest, so the demon ends up scoring a new priestly soul (and a new frying pan).  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> It’s been ~~one week since you looked at me~~ two months since this thing updated last. Moving, job hunting, and breaking two laptop charging cords in a row forced a bit of a hiatus, but!! I have more good news: I wrote ahead again! Another uhhhh like 20k+ on top of what was posted today, and over half of that is porn. Some of that is slightly (softly) D/s flavored and monsterfucking-adjacent, but not to the point where I feel like I should advertise for that in the top tags. There will be chapter-level warnings, but if you need more information than that please ask me in the comments or on my Tumblr and I’ll give you a better idea of what to expect.
> 
> **Next chapter will be posted on** 🎉 **Tuesday, August 18!** 🎉
> 
> _One last note:_ you may have noticed that there are some mildly concerning new tags towards the end of the list. Don’t worry. Those won’t be a thing for a few chapters yet, but I wanted to add them now so that they won’t become a nasty surprise later. Things got a little more intense in the writing of said chapter than they were in the outline… 👀 As a trade, I’ve fiddled around with the ending of the fic as a whole and made it a lot less fucking bleak.
> 
> I hope you all are safe and happy and healthy. <3


	6. Familiar Antiques

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Button by button, Aziraphale peeled away the layers between them, folded them in a neat little pile. Crowley watched his hands like a gambler watched a shell game, like he was waiting for the angel to turn over one of them and show Crowley where he’d tucked away the demon’s own heart into his palm. It had been his for so long that Crowley couldn’t remember when he’d lost it… if he’d ever even noticed the moment in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Notes:** Literally all but the first thousand-ish words of this is porn. As per the usual theme of this work, the sex can get a bit angsty at times, but it is very loving and is all done with explicit, enthusiastic consent.  
> Crowley is a poor touch starved thing, and so getting a lot of touch all at once is A Lot for him. There is also some body insecurity, though it’s specifically about nonhuman body parts.
> 
> Specific sex acts: Vaginal fingering & intercourse (with a toy), some very mild D/s elements and a bit of light bondage/hardcore snuggling.  
> Crowley and Aziraphale both have vulvas, and Crowley’s will get to do more than pine from afar in this chapter. They’re switches, as always. Aziraphale is up first again for our dance of the dueling service tops, and this time, there’s a bit of Soft Dom Aziraphale here, too (as well as in Crowley 😉). Also, a bit of AziraFeral, but again, it’s soft.

The most successful kind of temptation, Crowley thought, had one’s target doing most of the legwork. Sometimes that legwork was of the more literal sort. Within minutes of inviting Crowley into his storage room and showing him his new Chaucer, Aziraphale’s curiosity got the better of him, and he started shifting a few of the unopened crates around to peek at shipping labels and try to remember what each contained. At that point, all it took was Crowley helpfully manifesting a prybar from the ether and the poor angel was doomed. Nothing for it but to spend a long, lazy afternoon rediscovering his own long-lost treasures, cooing over each book and trinket as he found it again.

Although Crowley had performed the first successful temptation up on Earth, he himself had never been immune to them. That said, he was experienced enough to at least recognize when he was the target of one. Aziraphale had been tempting humans intentionally for nearly eight hundred years now, and unintentionally tempting Crowley for much longer. In the flickering lamplight of the storage room, he wondered if Aziraphale realized what a natural he was. The angel could write books on the art of being enticing, and Crowley would buy every last copy. Call it professional curiosity, but what he’d really be doing was giving humanity a fighting chance.

When he made the decision to dive into unpacking, Aziraphale took off his coat, folded it neatly over the back of the armchair, and rolled up the sleeves of his linen shirt to reveal strong arms dusted with pale hair. Their fingers brushed as Crowley passed off the prybar and he questioned himself frantically, silently, what the _Heaven_ that meant. Was it an accident? Was the angel _flirting_ with him? Then, Aziraphale got to work, lifting crate after crate as though they weighed nothing, as though they were empty pasteboard boxes instead of wooden and packed to the brim with heavy books. Crowley watched his arms flex as he prized the lids open, using the prybar like an afterthought, and he wondered if he’d be able to jump the queue in the Corporations Department if he told them he’d been discorporated by an angel.

Things were still a bit tense between them, a bit to the left of normal, as had been the case since they’d left the café. That tension, combined with Crowley’s front-row seats to the _Mr. Fell: Half-Dressed Strongman Show,_ made the storage room start to feel increasingly small. He had to fight the mad urge to make his excuses and dash back to his own lodgings to scream into a pillow for a bit. Probably wank, too, given what a pathetic bastard he was. But he hadn’t waited six years to see Aziraphale again only to be a coward when it counted, though, and so instead of running away, he slithered off the crate where he’d been perched and set about making an absolute nuisance of himself.

“This has to be a hundred years old, angel,” Crowley tutted, tugging a blue satin banyan out of the crate Aziraphale had abandoned after spotting some other shiny thing on the other side of the room.

“Only eighty-four,” Aziraphale countered, his eyes barely flicking up to check what Crowley had gotten his hands on.

It was in good condition, miraculously free of any wrinkles or insect damage, but Crowley wasn’t going to let a thing like that stop him from teasing.

“Hoarder.”

“It’s _comfortable.”_

They passed several hours poking through boxes in companionable silence, occasionally broken when one of them discovered something worth chatting about. At some point, Aziraphale gave up on the pretense of unpacking and just sat on the floor to look at his collection at length. He had some incomprehensible organization system in the works involving seven distinct stacks of books, and although Crowley couldn’t make heads or tails of his sorting criteria, he knew that none of the piles were things the angel planned on getting rid of.

Sometimes Crowley would lift something up and Aziraphale would look at him with such open fondness on his face that he felt his heart clench, and then he’d try to break the tension with a joke or a jab. It wasn’t enough to break it for long, though, or to let himself fully ignore that vast unspoken thing that lurked in the room with them. That thing that kept Crowley on his toes, whispering to him that no matter how friendly and polite things were between them, he would always remember how well he knew their bodies fit together. How those arms felt wrapped around him. The way Aziraphale’s lips tasted.

It was in this mindset of self-imposed distraction and barely concealed attraction that Crowley caught sight of something in one of the crates that had him struggling to suppress a snort. Among the myriad of breakable tchotchkes and fussy little knickknacks nestled in the packing straw he spotted something dark and polished. It was some kind of statuette carved from horn—water buffalo, maybe, or possibly from an ox—that was… well, Crowley assumed Aziraphale might describe it as _a bit rude looking._ Crowley himself would say it was distinctly cock-shaped. And, well, if the universe presented him with a perfect opportunity to tease the angel, maybe even get him riled up enough to have an entirely pointless argument, he wasn’t about to waste it.

“Hey, angel,” he called, dangling it in the air by its base. “Care to explain?”

Aziraphale looked up from one of the books he’d begun reading instead of sorting, his face heating scarlet as his eyes tracked the way it swayed in Crowley’s fingers. “Where in Heaven did you find that?”

“Nowhere in Heaven. In one of your boxes.” He thumped the side of the crate with his free hand. “Didn’t think this was quite your aesthetic, given how much you _tsked_ at all those ones the Romans put up everywhere.”

“Excuse me?”

“I see now that it was all a front. It’s making me reevaluate my plans for your housewarming gift, now that I know you’re planning to put lewd statues up in your shop. Should have gotten you something more in line with your refined artistic tastes.”

“Statues…? Crowley, what—” Aziraphale shook his head and started to scoot towards him across the floor, hand extended. “If you’re done playing with my things, I’ll just go put this away.” He gasped, his fingers closing around empty air as Crowley pulled the statue just out of his reach. “Oh, you absolute _devil._ Give that back at _once.”_

“Nah,” he said, grinning and lifting it even further away as Aziraphale made another attempt at snatching it. “Think I’d rather you try to take it from me.”

Aziraphale froze, those pretty lips of his parted, and Crowley’s head began to spin with the fear that he’d said the wrong thing. Then the angel closed his mouth, his expression going steely even as the tips of his ears began to pink. “We shall see about that, dear boy,” he said, squaring his shoulders, and then he lunged.

It was unfair, really. Crowley was fast and nimble, but he was on his knees and before he could think to try to get to his feet, Aziraphale had collided into him with enough force to knock him flat on his back. He would have hit his head against the floorboards, but Aziraphale’s arms— _fuck,_ those arms—were all around him, one hot hand cupping the back of his skull while the other was pressed between his shoulder blades. The rush of air from his lungs, though… that had nothing to do with the force of the impact and everything to do with the sudden abundance of angel laying on top of him and the overwhelming flood of arousal that hit him as a result.

He was dimly aware of the fact that he’d dropped the statue, that it was clattering against the floor and presumably rolling away, but he was far more interested in the way Aziraphale’s body was pressed against his. The weight of him pressing down even as the strength in those arms lifted Crowley up and crushed their bodies together.

No, it was absolutely not fair at all.

“There you are, you beastly thing,” the angel murmured in his ear, positively wicked. Crowley felt like his heartbeat must be almost deafening, battering itself against Aziraphale’s chest like some bird too stupid to know it was already caught. “I’ve got you.”

The tension that had been stretched between them all day was fraying, the moment endless until the inevitable, ineffable press of Aziraphale’s lips on his own snapped it in half like the brittle thing it had always been. As they crashed together, Crowley felt dazed, felt like he’d landed somewhere soft and safe before he’d even realized he had fallen. Things looked different on the other side of it. Gone was Aziraphale’s trepidation. Gone was the note of awkwardness in how they looked at one another, the careful ignoring of any significance underlying each word and glance. There were no excuses anymore, no jokes or deflection. Just heat and friction and anticipation. Just two bodies pressed close together and looking to get even closer.

“What am I to do with you, my meddlesome serpent?” Aziraphale asked, breaking the kiss to get a look at Crowley’s face. He was sure he looked a sight, flushed and breathing hard, probably wearing some slack-jawed expression, but the angel merely smiled down at him like he’d seen exactly what he’d hoped to.

“Lot of options,” Crowley managed to say, raw and breathless.

“Right you are,” Aziraphale said, his mouth close enough to Crowley’s face that he could feel the drag of the angel’s lips against his skin with each word. “If you want me to… what was it? Ah, yes. _Try and take it from you._ I still have that darling quim you were so good as to give me last time. That’s one of our _options.”_

The inside of Crowley’s mind was all static. There was some kind of strangled whining noise happening in the background, and he rather belatedly realized that he was the one making it. Aziraphale just… he couldn’t just _do_ things like that, couldn’t sound so put together while talking like that, while _touching_ him like that. The angel laughed, low and breathy, and Crowley felt the rumble of it though his whole body.

“If that’s what you want, I’m not opposed. Of course, I also wouldn’t be opposed to doing this the other way around, either.” The hands holding him in place shifted, the one on his back moving around to clutch at his hip while the one behind his head disappeared entirely from Crowley’s awareness. It was back soon after, accompanied by the sensation of the blunt head of the statue grazing against his cheek.

Aziraphale spoke again, his voice practically a purr against the shell of Crowley’s ear. “I could perhaps give a demonstration. Let you see for yourself what this old thing is good for.”

In fairness to himself, which wasn’t a thing he always found easy to offer, it _was_ a bit… abstract. Definitely enough like a real one for him to crack jokes about it, but it was wiggly enough that he thought he could be excused for thinking it might have only been cock-shaped by accident.

Of course Crowley knew what a dildo was. He was a nearly six-thousand-year-old demon. He’d owned quite a few of them over the centuries, actually. And he knew that Aziraphale—that he was interested in sex. Had been an active participant in that _interest,_ even…

But somehow, that knowledge hadn’t carried over into the expectation that Aziraphale might not only _own_ one, but might keep it in a box where Crowley might stumble across it.

It hadn’t occurred to him that he might get to hold such a thing—an _old thing,_ Aziraphale had called it, so how old was it? How long had Aziraphale found his pleasure with it?

And now he was touching Crowley with it, not a warning or a demand, just a gentle reminder of his _options._ A tantalizing prospect resting against his skin, his angel pressing soft little kisses to his hairline even as he said things that suggested he might quite like to fuck him with it.

Which…

If the surge of arousal was any indication, both Crowley and his corporation were very much interested in that possibility. He wanted to know how Aziraphale’s tidy hands looked wrapped around his carved-horn plaything. Wanted to know how, _precisely_ Aziraphale liked to fuck himself with it. Crowley had gotten to fuck him once, but he wanted to learn, wanted to be _shown_ how to do it right… and how better to learn than be guided by the angel’s own hands? To _feel_ what it was like, to press it into the memory of his body like the imprint of a key in wet clay.

“Show me,” he gasped, tilting his chin up and smushing noses into cheeks until he was able to find Aziraphale’s lips again. “Want you to—to let me feel it.”

Aziraphale caught Crowley’s bottom lip between his teeth and nipped gently. “Of course, my dear.” One of his hands crept lower, fingers ghosting over the fastenings of Crowley’s trousers. “Do you want to be undressed, or would…?”

Crowley snapped his fingers and his clothes fell to the floor on the other side of the room in a heap. Thankfully, he remembered to leave the glasses on. A bottle of oil landed somewhere nearby, almost tipping over. He wasn’t sure if it had originated from somewhere inside the bookshop or if he’d pulled it straight out of the firmament, but the easy, warm way Aziraphale laughed at his eagerness was comforting. It found the little spark of anxiety that told him he was doing—being— _too much_ and snuffed it out before the smoke could rise and choke him.

With a parting kiss, Aziraphale sat back upright. He was close still, but the new distance between them, the absence of the pressure against Crowley’s body, felt almost unbearable. He felt so very open and exposed like this, a jumble of limbs spread out naked before Aziraphale—still mostly clothed, even as he tugged off his cravat with methodical slowness—with nothing to hold him together, nothing to hold him steady.

He had known before he vanished his clothes that Aziraphale had settled between his thighs, but seeing it was a different thing entirely. His legs were lying open, splayed where they’d landed when the angel had taken them both to the floor. Unable to close them even if he’d wanted to, Aziraphale kneeling between them as he undressed. Completely bloody obvious to anyone with eyes how wet he was, how ready he was for it.

It wasn’t that he wanted to be covered, that he didn’t want to be looked at. He just… he _wanted_ … Aziraphale was just _so far away_ and he needed him closer, needed to feel him. Needed to be held again.

Button by button, Aziraphale peeled away the layers between them, folded them in a neat little pile. Crowley watched his hands like a gambler watched a shell game, like he was waiting for the angel to turn over one of them and show Crowley where he’d tucked away the demon’s own heart into his palm. It had been his for so long that Crowley couldn’t remember when he’d lost it… if he’d ever even noticed the moment in the first place.

Aziraphale was stripped to the waist by the time he looked back down, broad chest and soft belly tantalizingly bare in the lamplight. Crowley wasn’t sure what Aziraphale saw, exactly, that made him click his tongue like that. A naked demon breathing like he was on the brink of either an orgasm or a panic attack, despite the fact he hadn’t even been touched yet. A wiry jumble of bone and skin and desperation. Something worth pitying, definitely, because after he clicked his tongue Aziraphale stopped trying to compete for the title of “world’s slowest strip tease” and leaned down to kiss him again.

Their bodies pressed together, a heavy curve bending a tangled line to fit its shape. Aziraphale’s hands were steady as he explored every inch of Crowley he could reach—gentle along the column of his throat, warm against his ribs and his stomach, maddening as they slipped down the backs of his thighs. All the while, Aziraphale’s mouth was on Crowley’s, trading desperate kisses and whispered endearments. When his fingers slipped between Crowley’s legs and began to tease at his entrance, Crowley’s embarrassing whine was muffled against the angel’s tongue. When he finally dipped the tip of a finger inside him, working in shallow circles that hinted at the kind of blissful stretch Crowley craved, the litany of curses he hissed were spoken against Aziraphale’s lips.

“Look at you,” Aziraphale whispered, his breath hot against Crowley’s burning cheek.

He twisted his wrist so he could reach Crowley’s clit with his thumb, that finger sinking just slightly deeper into his cunt. The relief it brought was short-lived and Crowley quickly found himself wanting more. He wrapped his legs around Aziraphale, crossing his ankles behind his back as he tilted his hips up in a desperate bid to get the angel to push in further.

Aziraphale laughed, soft and indulgent, and began to rock his hand back and forth. Each push dragged his fingertip against Crowley’s walls, and each pull back found his thumb rubbing another circle around his clit. Crowley clung to him as best he could while person-shaped, with limbs instead of one long coil for a body. His hands roamed over Aziraphale’s back and shoulders like he was trying to embrace him again and again, like he was trying to make up for all those times he wanted to hold him but couldn’t.

“You feel so good,” the angel said as he slipped another finger inside Crowley’s hungry body, something too close to wonder in his voice.

Crowley bit off the shattered sound his throat decided to make, smothered it between his teeth and the softness of Aziraphale’s neck, holding onto his angel with legs and arms and teeth—not too sharp, nothing that could hurt, but Aziraphale liked it. He said as much, his breathing going all huffy as he pressed in deeper and harder with those two fingers, both of them twisting and sliding and turning everything they touched to fire, the slow orbit of his thumb working in time to melt Crowley down to a pile of slick and lust.

“You feel so wonderfully hot inside,” Aziraphale breathed, and Crowley bit down again because he wasn’t—he _wasn’t._

He had to know, didn’t he? After this long, after _touching_ him, Aziraphale had to have found out the truth. Had to know about the frozen thing that coiled and spiraled inside of the core of a demon, the heavy weight of absence and the chill of what was lost. He had to know how cold Crowley was, how hard he worked to find something—anything—that made him forget the numbness that gathered in the corners of his mind like frostbite on bare fingers.

Aziraphale had to know that it was only the heat from his sun that could make Crowley feel warm.

Everything was fine while Aziraphale was laying on top of him. While the comforting pressure of him gave Crowley something to press up into, something to anchor him while his brain turned to soup and his heart felt like it was about to crack in half. But then Aziraphale shifted, sat back on his knees, and there was _distance_ between them again. Not much, because he could still hold onto him, could still wrap his legs around behind his thighs—for fuck’s sake, Aziraphale was still inside of him, he should really stop complaining—but he was far enough away that it felt like a loss.

It was only so Aziraphale could get comfortable, put his hand on the floor beside Crowley’s head for balance and fuck him with those thick, clever fingers that stretched and pushed with just enough friction to make him moan, except— _except._ He didn’t have Aziraphale’s throat beneath his teeth anymore, didn’t have _anything_ holding back his tongue from saying the kind of things that would shatter this impossible moment. Crowley put his palm over his mouth, feeling his canines sharpening against his own skin as he bit down on a high, hitching noise that felt dangerously close to a sob.

Some aching little part of him wondered in that moment if perhaps they should have never done this at all. He’d survived for thousands of years without knowing what it felt like to have Aziraphale hold him, to be so close that they were inside one another. That ignorance had protected him, because as miserable as that that unsatisfied longing for touch had been, Crowley hadn’t actually known back then how good the real thing could be. His imagination was powerful, but it had fallen so short of reality, and now it was impossible to unknow the truth. A box that couldn’t be closed again. An apple that couldn’t be uneaten. He knew what it was like now, yes. But it made all the moments where Aziraphale wasn’t in his arms—the _years_ he knew they would have to be apart—the kind of agony the Torments department Downstairs spent centuries trying to reproduce.

Aziraphale drew Crowley back out of his worries with a kiss to his forehead, which had the side effect of making him notice how fucking sweaty his corporation was getting already, _apparently._ The angel’s other hand, the one not currently three knuckles deep in Crowley’s body and busy reducing him to a gasping puddle on the storage room floor, reached for him. Took his hand away from his mouth, pressed it down against the floorboards with enough of a suggestion of that angelic strength to make Crowley’s head swim. Threaded their fingers together. Squeezed.

His back arched, hips grinding down on Aziraphale’s hand, and some embarrassing little breathy groan found its way out of his mouth. When he was capable of opening his eyes again, he saw Aziraphale looking down at him with a look of pure bastardry on his face. Crowley had seen that look before many times, covetous, hungry, and clever. It was the kind of look he made at auctions when another bidder was after something he wanted and Aziraphale decided to himself that, angel or not, _he_ was the only person who’d be putting hands on that musty old book. It was the look he gave when he decided he’d rather had enough of Crowley cheating at cards and was about to do something to level the playing field. Aziraphale _wanted_ something, and he intended to get it. Damn him a second time, but Crowley would make sure he did.

It felt strange, alien but not unwelcome, to think that there might be something of himself that Aziraphale might want. Whatever it was, Crowley was willing to hand it over, because there was nothing of himself that he didn’t want to share. He’d crack open his own ribs and give him his heart if that’s what the angel wanted. His lungs. His _wings._

Aziraphale crooked his fingers again, just so, and Crowley bit the inside of his cheek, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to sting. He’d nearly slipped again, gotten too close to saying something—shouting it, probably—he couldn’t take back.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” Aziraphale asked, voice silky and suggestive for all that he acted as though he already had the answer. Crowley nodded, shifting his hips again, unsure of what exactly Aziraphale meant but knowing that yes, _yes,_ he liked all of this. He loved everything Aziraphale was willing to give him. He loved—he _loved_ —

“Tell me, please.”

Crowley nodded again, harder, and managed to bite out something approximating an answer. “S’good, s’all good, angel _please…”_

Aziraphale shifted his grip where he was holding Crowley’s hand, stretching his arm up over his head and pinning it harder to the floor. His body leaned over Crowley’s, that bright-eyed bastard look still sharp and beautiful on his pink-cheeked face. Crowley could only whimper in response.

“You like it when I hold you down like this,” he said, an observation rather than a question.

Crowley squeezed his hand, hoping the angel would accept that as an answer, hoping he wouldn’t ask for more words because Crowley was quickly losing his capacity for speech. Besides, how could he explain just how _much_ he liked it? How pathetic he was, that in the years they’d been apart he’d brought himself off as many times on the memory of Aziraphale’s arms around him as he had on the memory of fucking him? How much it thrilled him to be reminded of the strength beneath the angel’s softness, to be held close and tight so he knew he wasn’t going to shatter?

He wasn’t sure he deserved much mercy, but Aziraphale showed it to him anyway. The angel leaned in close, close enough that Crowley could feel his lips brush against the shell of his ear. “Squeeze again for _yes,_ twice if I ever do something you don’t like, or if you want me to stop. Is that alright?” Crowley clutched at his hand like a lifeline, feeling his own pulse racing in his palm and in the hot slide of his body around Aziraphale’s fingers.

Aziraphale squeezed back in confirmation, and when he spoke, his voice was bright and eager. “I’m going to move you now, dear, and then I’m going to fuck you.”

Unwilling to let go, Crowley held on tight to Aziraphale’s hand as the angel began to move, fingers slipping free of Crowley’s cunt only to slide beneath him and lift him off the floor like he was weightless. Crowley didn’t breathe at all as he was shifted around and settled in Aziraphale’s lap, his torso draped over one thigh and his arse hiked up in the air over the other, the angel’s folded clothes tucked between his cheek and the floor. His glasses were a bit uncomfortable like this, slightly askew and pressed up awkwardly against the bridge of his nose, but he found himself unable to care. He was achingly empty, his own slick practically dripping out of him, and Aziraphale’s thighs were so warm and plush beneath him. His face felt like it was on fire as he waited for something, anything to happen.

“Give me your hands, please,” Aziraphale asked, tapping gently at the base of Crowley’s spine. He obeyed, and Aziraphale crossed Crowley’s wrists neatly, one atop the other, before threading his own fingers together with the hand that he’d placed on top. “There. Is that comfortable?”

Crowley rolled his shoulders and felt a swooping pang of arousal and delight to find that, spread out as he was across Aziraphale’s lap, arms pinned behind his back in a grip that was gentle but completely immovable… he was stuck. He could shift around, sure, especially given how flexible he was, but he couldn’t _move._ Not unless Aziraphale wanted him to.

He squeezed the angel’s hand and, for good measure, forced his throat to cooperate enough to answer out loud. “Yeah. S’fine.”

“Splendid,” Aziraphale said, shifting his legs to gather Crowley up closer against his belly, that hand keeping him exactly where he wanted him.

The next thing Crowley knew, he felt the blunt, slicked head of Aziraphale’s thrice-damned antique dildo trailing up along his inner thigh. He knew he was doomed. Dignity was completely beyond him now, as was any kind of cool he might have once hoped to maintain. He was being _snuggled,_ and if the burning in his eyes from _that_ realization wasn’t bad enough, he was probably about to come embarrassingly quickly from whatever Aziraphale had planned for him.

Then it occurred to him that it didn’t really… matter. It wasn’t really up to him when he came, was it? He’d handed control of this whole encounter over to Aziraphale, and that should have scared him. He hated feeling powerless, hated when Hell reached out its hands and took another fistful of his autonomy away from him, but this was different. This felt safe. This didn’t feel like Aziraphale was taking anything of Crowley’s. Aziraphale was _giving_ him something— _everything_ —and the idea of that was enough to make him dizzy with it.

“You know, I really am quite happy you found this, even if you were wretchedly teasing me about it,” Aziraphale mused, guiding his toy ever closer to Crowley’s achingly empty cunt. “It must have been… mmmm. Probably two hundred years since I had to pack it away. I’d wondered where it had gotten off to.”

The dildo bypassed his genitals entirely, following a meandering path up one leg and down the other. Then, it vanished from Crowley’s awareness altogether and he could have screamed from impatience.

“Crowley…” The sound of his name spoken like that, low and rumbling through him in all the places where their bodies touched, was enough to get Crowley to still his wriggling. “I want to make this good for you, so you must tell me if you ever want anything different.”

“Yeah. Yeah… ‘course,” Crowley said, shocked at how croaky he sounded already. He squeezed Aziraphale’s hand partly for emphasis, partly because he was thrilled that was a thing he was allowed to even _do._

“I’ve only ever fucked myself this way,” the angel continued, sliding the head of the dildo along Crowley’s labia—and kicking his idiot heart into overdrive while he was at it. He felt the oil clinging to the hair there in its wake, just a hint of friction behind an otherwise maddeningly light touch. Just a suggestion of what might be to come, but it was enough to send Crowley’s imagination speeding right on ahead. “But I thought I might start by showing you my favorite thing about this toy you picked.”

Crowley nodded, hard, his glasses knocking even further askew where his face was mushed against the bookshop floor. He felt the head of the dildo finally, _finally_ start to press into him, just the faintest hint of stretch around the very tip of it, but Aziraphale was in no rush. He pushed slowly, enough pressure behind it that Crowley knew it would slip right in if he only _moved._ Crowley knew there was strength in those arms, _felt_ it in the way Aziraphale held him anchored in place in his lap with his off hand. The moment was drawn out until it was nearly unbearable, Aziraphale opening up Crowley’s body again by degrees until—

_“Ah! Fuck—fuck,”_ Crowley swore, feeling the head of the toy finally breach his body. It was wider than the rest of it, not by much but enough for it to make a _fucking difference,_ and he could have come right then and there from the sheer relief of being filled again.

“Good?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley nodded again, squeezed his hand, tried uselessly to push back and fuck himself on it, anything to convince the angel that he was fine, he was _fine,_ and he could get on with it already.

Aziraphale pushed the dildo all the way in, and Crowley began to learn the shape of it more intimately—fairly thin other than the rounded head, curved just enough to make it interesting, and the underside of it was— _fuck._

“The texture,” the angel said conversationally, as though Crowley’s muffled moan had been a question instead of wholehearted approval of all the rippling ridges Aziraphale had just introduced him to on the backstroke. “That’s why I like this one so much.”

He’d known Aziraphale could be a bit of a hedonist, but it was something else altogether to be shown it, thrust by languid thrust. Restrained like he was, he was completely at the angel’s mercy, his to do as he liked with, and what Aziraphale seemed to like to do was to drive Crowley half out of his mind. Fucking it into him with a firm hand, hinting at the strength in his arms while still being so much gentler than anything he expected or deserved. Dragging it out again with agonizing slowness so he could feel the textured shaft. Teasing at his sensitive entrance with the broad head of the toy, sometimes only stretching him with it and other times pulling it all the way out to make him take it again.

If this was how Aziraphale fucked himself, Crowley burned with the need to be able to watch that someday.

Gradually, Crowley became aware of the fact that there were scales on his lower back, right where his— _eugh_ —tail sprouted from whenever he got in that weird in-between stage before going full snake. If that was the case, his feet were probably a lost cause. He tended to forget they existed sometimes, so they could get pretty scaly before he thought to get them in check again. For all he knew, he might have scales as high up as his ankles by now, especially if he was distracted enough to let his spine… oh, _shit._

He realized, a bit late, that the only reason he had noticed that the scales on his spine were out in the first place was because _Aziraphale was touching them._ Stroking the line between scale and skin with the thumb of the same hand he was using to pin Crowley’s arms in place.

Was he doing it on purpose? Did he know what he was touching? With his head down like this, Crowley couldn’t see where Aziraphale was looking, couldn’t tell if he’d noticed yet. He was busy fucking Crowley out of his senses with that dildo, he could be forgiven for not paying close attention to what his other hand was doing. It might be an accident.

Then again, it might not be, and that… that thought shouldn’t be as much of a turn on as it was. Crowley knew he should be mortified that the angel was seeing him lose control of his corporation like this. It was hard to pay attention to the embarrassment, though, not when his arousal was so much louder. That and the simple, reptilian relaxation that kind of touch brought on. Aziraphale had touched him before when he was in his snake form, and his hands had always felt decadently, _luxuriously_ warm on his scales. Crowley was pleased to discover that it felt similarly when he was mostly human-shaped. Shameless thing that he was, he arched his back up into the touch as much as he could with his angel holding him down.

After a few moments of strained concentration and measured breathing, Crowley was able to feel the scales fade. That thumb continued to pet him, the rhythm unchanged… perhaps that meant the angel hadn’t noticed after all.

Then Aziraphale did something unexpected and delightful, some shift in angle paired with a gradual build in speed, and Crowley was no longer able to think coherent thoughts. All he could do was squeeze Aziraphale’s hand, both a wordless thanks and a plea for more all wrapped up in a single gesture. His hips bucked uselessly, legs spreading as far apart as they could in the position the angel had chosen for them.

Aziraphale held him steady, fucking him through the rising crest of his orgasm and letting him down gently on the other side. As the last aftershocks faded, the angel let go of his wrists and let Crowley’s arms fall to his sides. He spent a moment just running his hands over Crowley’s body, up along the plane of his shoulders, softly kneading his backside and down his thighs, and then he leaned down to kiss the back of Crowley’s sweaty neck. His cunt was still sensitive and clenched weakly as Aziraphale pulled out of him and set the toy away.

“Let’s get up off of this floor, mmm?” The angel murmured in his ear.

Crowley groped for his glasses, straightened them, held them in place as Aziraphale scooped him into his arms and lifted him up and away. He felt the way their bare skin stuck together, felt the soft scrape of Aziraphale’s chest hair against his ribs. The steady beat of his heart. He let his head loll against the Aziraphale’s shoulder as he was carried, breathing in deep to fill his lungs with the smell of angel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **~~Dildo Facts:~~**  
>  **Historical Note:** Dildos are really, really old, y’all. There’s debate about how old they are, because when archaeologists find some suggestive statuary of the appropriate size and shape from early human history, they have to question why exactly it was made. Was it a masturbatory/sex aid? Was it for fertility rituals? Was it intended to be décor? Is it only accidentally shaped like it should go in an orifice? Is the object’s purpose some combination of any or all of those answers?  
> Also, a lot of dildos were likely made out of materials that degraded over time, so in a lot of cases dildologists (I’m kidding, that’s not what they’re called) have to rely on secondary evidence such as scenes showing dildos on Greek vases.  
> That being said, the term “dildo” was in use in English at least as early as 1593, so as much as it felt anachronistic to call it that in a scene set in 1799, this was not a “lead balloon” moment after all.
> 
> The water buffalo horn toy Aziraphale has here is loosely based off of ones featured in _shunga_ art created in Japan in the 17th-18th centuries. His was definitely a custom piece, though, designed to fit his discerning tastes and also so that he could have plausible deniability as to its intended function. Our boy doesn’t like leaving evidence lying around, so I can’t see him wanting something that would be incriminating if Heaven found it. Crowley won’t be fair to himself, but I will: In fairness to poor Crowley, it was wiggly and abstract _on purpose._  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> Chapter 7 is (you guessed it) still more porn, and will be posted **Thursday, August 27th!**
> 
> You can expect another preview to go up on my Tumblr the day before for WIP Wednesday, which I guess is a thing I’m doing now. I had thought about trying to stick to a Tuesday update schedule, but the 25th is my good lady wife’s birthday and I’m going to try to cook her a fun dinner.


	7. Unfamiliar Tongues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s been a while since your hair has been this short,” Aziraphale said while Crowley’s head was turned. “The way it looks now reminds me of the way you wore it in Rome.”
> 
> Saying it then would have felt more natural than breathing, exhaling his truth like a smoke ring, lighter than air and impossible to catch once said.
> 
> _“Think I loved you even then,”_ he could have said, and it would have felt so right.
> 
> _“It’s been so long since I’ve known true north,”_ he could have said. _“Stars don’t guide me anymore. My compass only points east.”_
> 
> He couldn’t say any of that, so he looked back and let the sight of the angel’s body in the lamplight steal his breath away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Notes:**  
>  No noncon/dubcon, but this chapter depicts the fear of accidentally violating a partner’s boundaries. While this isn’t _about_ internalized homophobia, that fear can be an element of it, and as that aspect of it hit close to home for me, I wanted to CW it for you. This theme is pretty significant in the chapter, so please take care of yourself and skip this chapter if you need to. There is also more info in the endnote if you’d like context before deciding to read.  
> Lots of messy, angsty, loving, and enthusiastically consensual sex, some of which is slightly monsterfuckery.  
> More body insecurity, specifically about nonhuman body parts.  
> Alcohol, and allusions to consensually drunk sex that happens off-page.  
> Very vague & low-detail allusions other sexual encounters Crowley had in the past (pre-Aziraphale). Basically, all it is in this chapter is noting that those did happen.
> 
> Specific sex acts: Oral sex/tongue fucking ft. an otherwise human-shaped Crowley’s giant snake tongue  
> Aziraphale finally gets undressed in this one! Both Crowley and Aziraphale have vulvas, and this time, it’s Crowley’s turn to wear the Top Hat ( _wink_ ).

They settled in the armchair. Crowley sat curled and pliant in Aziraphale’s lap, letting the angel fuss over him with minimal protest. Aziraphale rubbed the backs of his hands and his wrists, kissed Crowley’s forehead as he pushed the hair out of his eyes. It felt like something out of a dream, but as the endorphins faded the ridiculousness of the situation began to hit him.

Aziraphale had… had just bloody _tackled him._ Right to the floor of the storeroom! And then he’d fucked him silly with a dildo older than any living human being. A dildo that probably predated the development of Protestantism, and that was currently sitting next to them on the spindly little end table next to the chair like a lurking, still-wet reminder that, _yes,_ that had all just fucking happened.

Satan help him, he started to laugh.

“Y'know, you can ask me first if you ever decide you want to do something like that again.”

“Hm?”

“You can ask me. Doesn't have to... to be a heat of the moment thing.”

Aziraphale blanched and pulled his hands away from where they'd been holding Crowley’s, started trying to make a stammering apology. Crowley put a finger to his lips to stop him.

“Wait. No. That's not... I didn't mean it like that. Don't go... don't go doing that thing where you get all concerned about me. I liked it, promise.” He looked down at his own lap and his slick inner thighs. “You've got verbal and physical proof I enjoyed myself. I definitely wanted that. Would be interested in doing that again sometime, even, if—if that were something you liked, too.”

Aziraphale nodded, looking confused and still a bit alarmed. “What... _did_ you mean, then?”

Crowley sighed and leaned his head back, hoping the blank wall behind him would help him not to make an absolute arse of himself. Unfortunately, it held no answers for him. “All I meant was... just. You... you seemed nervous. Earlier, I mean. Before we... before all the...” He gestured vaguely between where they were piled up in the armchair and where the dildo was perched beside them. “I just wanted you to know that... that you don't have to be nervous. Not with me. For as long as you're interested in doing any of this. I'm up for it. Any of it.”

The angel looked at him for a long moment, then leaned in close and kissed him. As he pulled back, he said, “I... I feel the same. I need you to know that the only reason I hesitated before was because... I'm sure you'll find this rather foolish, but I’m… well, I’ve never been very brave.” Crowley made a face at him that he hoped conveyed how ridiculous he found that statement. Aziraphale ignored him and kept speaking. “And even though we’ve always sobered ourselves up before, the times we’ve done this in the past… I’ve had liquid courage to help me.”

“I did offer to get you drunk earlier.”

Aziraphale shook his head, his lips tight. “No. No, while I appreciated that, I wanted us both to go into this clear-headed. I didn’t want to set a precedent, to—to make you think…”

“That you needed to be pissed to want to have sex?” Crowley said it with a smile like it was a joke, but the question awoke something tiny and scared inside him and he realized he needed to hear Aziraphale explain it away.

“I didn’t want you to think I was making a decision on impulse, that I hadn’t thought this through.” Aziraphale looked at him very closely, and for a moment Crowley wondered if the lenses of his glasses had gone clear when he hadn’t been looking. They hadn’t, the room was still dimmed by the glass, but the look was so _searching_ he felt his eyes might as well have been bare. “I would never want you to believe I was willing to put you at risk because I was drunk and ruttish.”

Crowley absolutely wasn’t going to cry. He had complete and total control over his corporation, even if parts of it were… were a bit wonky. Post-orgasm. With all the—the hormone thingies. Or whatever the equivalent was for demons. He breathed in, long and slow, and by the time he exhaled his throat had decided it was done tightening up and his eyes had found better things to do than burn.

“Like I said. I… I like all of this. What we’re doing.” To his credit, his voice stayed steady. “You can ask to fuck whenever you want to. Blanket permission to bring it up.”

“Not in public, though,” Aziraphale said quickly.

He nodded. “Yeah, ‘course not. This is a… behind doors only thing. Can’t let anybody know. But any time we meet up, any time we’re on our own. You don’t have to worry about it. I can… pretty much guarantee I’m going to be interested.”

Aziraphale gave him a fond smile and hugged him closer to his chest. “Thank you, my dear. That is… that’s a comfort. I’ll remember that for next time. And of course, please know you can ask the same of me whenever you’d like.”

Crowley heard the words, and he wanted to believe them… but he still doubted that he could trust them. _Whenever he liked_ was… well, it was all the time, wasn’t it? It was moving his ferns in upstairs and starting a fuck marathon that would last until the heat death of the universe. Aziraphale couldn’t know the kind of ravenous, needy person he was talking to when he said that. Better, then, to keep letting Aziraphale set the pace.

He cleared his throat and redirected. “Next time… that’s Thursday, you said? For meeting up, I mean. Didn't want to just assume you asked me over Thursday as a sex thing.”

“Oh! No, Thursday is absolutely a sex thing. If you're free, of course.”

The first thing that came out of his mouth was a sort of strange, creaky exhale. Then, a vaguely hoarse, “M'free.”

“Oh, good. I was rather looking forward to it.”

His next question was an important one, and Crowley took pains to ensure that it came out clearly. “... You invited me over for a shag while you already had me over for one?”

“I apologize if that was rude of me. I wasn't sure what the done thing was when it came to this... type of social call.”

Crowley laughed. “Not sure there is much of a _done thing_ for this. Or for us in general. Couple of immortals meeting up to fuck on the sly, they don't exactly cover that in etiquette books.”

“... no. I suppose they don't. Perhaps this is the sort of thing we have to figure out on our own.” He chuckled and kissed Crowley again. “I have confidence in us. We've done it before.”

There was a long exhale, a pause where all they did was sit in the same space together and breathe. Crowley’s head lay against Aziraphale’s chest, the angel’s heartbeat thudding beneath his ear. Like so much of this—the sex, the kissing, all those things he never thought they’d get, and beneath all of the rest, a friendship forged over thousands of years—that heartbeat was as comforting as it was confusing. Aziraphale didn’t _need_ a heartbeat any more than he needed the Arrangement, any more than he needed Crowley… but he chose to have it anyway. Crowley wondered why that was. He’d made his own heart start to beat as a way to blend in with the humans, ever so clever as they were at picking up on tiny differences that marked a stranger as an _other,_ and along the way he’d forgotten to turn it off again. Was that what Crowley was, too, a convenience so long present that Aziraphale had forgotten just how much Crowley didn’t belong here?

… But did it really matter? He wouldn’t be here forever, no. He knew that. Aziraphale’s wasn’t his, not in any way that mattered. Heaven owned him, and as much as he hoped Aziraphale would see that for the prison it was, that loyalty mattered to Aziraphale more than anything else. But those were worries for the future. Crowley was here _now,_ and that was more than he ever expected to get. Whatever facsimile of a heart that was inside the angel’s chest was beating, steady and strong, and his lap was too comfortable and warm for Crowley to care much for any future more than a few seconds away.

Aziraphale’s thumb stroked the side of his face, rubbing in slow, methodical circles in the space between his tattoo and the earpiece of his glasses. Never touching either one. Precise, careful, like that was a choice he made on purpose.

“Crowley, I…” Aziraphale began, then cut himself off short. Crowley shifted in his lap, tilting his head up to listen better. “If I… if I asked you to do something you didn’t want to, would you tell me no?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“No, no that’s exactly what…” He shook his head. “It’s a hypothetical.”

“Oh,” Crowley said, feeling strangely deflated.

“But if I asked you for something that… that made you uncomfortable. You would tell me, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t—wouldn’t just do it for my sake… would you?”

Well. Nothing like a statement like _that_ to get his curiosity piqued. What kind of things could Aziraphale want from him that he thought might be too much to ask of a demon?

“Like I said, angel. You can ask me. It’s… it’s pretty hard to shock me. I don’t have many boundaries, but if you find one on accident, I’ll stop you.”

He watched something in Aziraphale’s expression crumple in the instant before he caught himself, schooling his face back into neutrality. “What if… what if it wasn’t an accident? What if I knew where a boundary was but I pushed you anyway?”

“You wouldn’t. That doesn’t sound like you at all.”

Crowley would know. He’d made sure anything resembling a boundary or a personal standard was deeply buried under layers of sarcasm and half-truth. It was better to be known as shallow, slimy, and completely without shame or scruples. While most other demons preferred breaking bones, Crowley knew of a few who had more fun breaking things like dignity, pride, and any lingering sense of ethics that might have survived the trip Downstairs.

Aziraphale looked away, but not before Crowley noticed the guilt written in the lines of his mouth. He groaned. “Is this about earlier, still? I told you. You didn’t do anything I didn’t want you to.”

“No. It’s not that, its…” Aziraphale paused, then cleared his throat. “Your eyes.”

Without conscious thought, Crowley’s hand jerked up to the eyepiece of his glasses. He was relieved to see that they were on straight, that nothing should be showing… but the speed of the movement made Aziraphale flinch, made him drop his hands to his lap and fold them like he’d been scolded. Like he’d just been slapped on the back of the wrist. It was a familiar gesture, one of the angel’s oldest tells. Crowley hated to see it, and hated the thought that he had caused it.

“Yeah?” He asked, trying to encourage Aziraphale to keep talking. To not shut his mouth and make himself smaller.

The angel shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve gone about this in completely the wrong way. What I mean to say is…” Aziraphale swallowed. “You’re beautiful, Crowley.”

“What?” Crowley croaked.

“Your… your human form. All that you’ve shown me. But I never want… I know that there are... _aspects_ of... well, of both of us, really. Things that we might prefer to keep hidden.” Eyes screwed shut, Aziraphale tilted his head up towards the ceiling, and Crowley couldn’t tell if he was hoping for guidance or if looking Heavenward was just that much of a reflex. “And that’s… that’s okay, it really is…”

Crowley nodded, not that Aziraphale could see him. Took a slow breath that Aziraphale could probably feel him take, but there was nothing for it. He wasn’t entirely sure what had prompted this, but Crowley knew it was best to head this kind of talk off before Aziraphale started feeling all _conflicted_ about it. Before he started trying to be all selfless and push himself past his own boundaries out of some kind of misguided sense of kindness or pity. Besides, it wasn’t like this was a surprise. Crowley had always known that there were parts of him that Aziraphale didn’t want to see.

“Hey,” he said, voice low and soft and steady, no strain or roughness in it at all. “You’re right. It’s okay. Not worth worrying about, Aziraphale. It… it is what it is. I’m fine right where we are… if you are?”

Aziraphale opened his eyes again and looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Of course. Yes, I’m—I’m perfectly fine as well. No need to—to complicate what already works.”

Crowley let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, relief flowing in to fill that void. He stretched and shifted in the angel’s lap, feeling the soft rasp of the fabric of Aziraphale’s breeches against his own bare skin. Aziraphale let go of his own hand where he’d been twisting at his ring, laying his palm like a blessing on Crowley’s calf.

“Can I kiss you?” Aziraphale asked, quiet and hopeful.

He didn’t understand it, couldn’t figure out what kind of world Aziraphale thought he lived in where Crowley _didn’t_ want to be kissing him any chance he fucking got.

Crowley answered the angel without words, smiling against his lips as he brought their mouths together. Aziraphale could be so strange at times, asking him that now, after they’d already done so much more than kiss. Still, something warm and content bloomed in him to hear the question.

“Let you do a lot more than kiss me.”

“Is that so?” Aziraphale caught Crowley’s bottom lip between his teeth, oh so gently. “Tell me, what did you have in mind?”

“Last I checked I was in the lead, so that makes it your turn to pick.”

“In the—Crowley, it isn’t a race!”

“Good, because if it were, I would be winning, and you would be terribly behind.”

Aziraphale shot him a withering look that managed to be, at the same time, quite fond. “How does one _win_ at sexual intercourse, my dear?”

He draped his arm over Aziraphale’s shoulders and pressed a line of kisses into the side of his neck and up under his jaw. “To start,” he said, his other hand sliding lower to hover over the place where Aziraphale’s bare chest met the top of his breeches, “I hear most people get naked.”

“I see you’ve managed that bit.” It really was a profound talent of Aziraphale’s to sound that tart even while he was turning pink around the cheeks and ears from Crowley’s wandering mouth and hands.

“S’why I’m winning,” Crowley teased. He sat back just enough to watch the angel’s face. “And here you are with your shoes and socks still on.”

“You are welcome to relieve me of them, if you’d like.” Aziraphale’s eyes narrowed, amused and sharp. “Or anything else I am wearing, for that matter.”

“Oh. Well, if that’s an invitation…” Crowley said, the corners of his mouth twitching up as he trailed his fingers lower and popped the first button free.

“Only if you’re interested.”

Another button. “M’interested.

Aziraphale kissed him again. It started off relatively chaste but grew hungrier by the moment, his tongue dipping into Crowley’s mouth like he wanted to savor him. His hands were hot when they settled on Crowley’s waist, and to his delight Aziraphale actually bucked his hips up into him. The angle was all wrong, they were all perpendicular in this chair and Crowley’s legs were in the way of everything, but it felt _good_ to know that Aziraphale wanted more. More sensation, more of _him…_ He found himself holding on to the back of Aziraphale’s neck with one hand while the other was busy fumbling for any other buttons he could reach while still sitting in the angel’s lap.

When he could do no more from his spot in the chair, Crowley slithered out of Aziraphale's lap and settled at his feet on his knees. He tugged off Aziraphale's boots, one right after the other, and paused to enjoy the way it felt to hold the angel's calves in his hands, the way his muscles filled his palms, how warm they were even through his stockings.

“What would you like?” Crowley asked. His fingers found the ribbon garter holding up one of those stockings and he slowly pulled the knot loose. He set it to the side and began pressing kisses into each inch of the pale-haired skin that was revealed as he rolled the stocking down.

He was halfway through with the angel's other leg when Crowley felt Aziraphale's hand brush along his jaw and beneath his chin, tentative and gentle. Crowley paused in his kisses and looked up at his angel, then found himself temporarily speechless at the way those fluffy curls shone in the lamplight. Even more stunning was the way Aziraphale was watching him, his eyes half-lidded, his lips pink and shiny and parted. He licked them as he swallowed, his throat working beneath that soft roll that appeared whenever he tipped his chin down towards his chest.

_Fuck._ Crowley was so in love he could have drowned in it.

“You make quite the picture, my dear,” Aziraphale said, his finger stroking the side of Crowley's throat. There was a rough note to his voice, something that spoke of strain. Of need.

“On my knees, you mean?” Crowley asked, pulling the stocking all the way off and tucking it away out of sight with its mate. “In between your legs?”

He gripped Aziraphale's calf again and lifted it up to his lips, insinuating himself between the angel's knees to kiss the inside of his leg. He didn't miss the way Aziraphale's thighs parted to make space for him, and then just a bit wider apart after that.

“Could you—” Aziraphale began, then sucked in a breath as Crowley’s hands crept higher, squeezing gently around his thigh over the fabric of his breeches. “It’s… I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to—to do next.”

“What’s the verdict?”

The angel laughed once, bright and clear. “All of it, I think. Can I pick that?”

Like the pathetic sap he was, Crowley was helpless to resist the urge to nudge his head up against Aziraphale’s thigh and just lean on him, a sappy grin growing on his face. “Think we could manage that, yeah.”

“I’d still need to pick something to start with, and it’s so hard to choose…”

“Dunno…” Crowley teased, his grin growing sharper and more wolfish. “Could… could maybe give myself a couple of cocks and half a dozen extra cunts and arseholes and we could just go at it all at once.”

That earned him a gasp as Aziraphale’s perfect, rosy face scrunched up into an expression of horrified delight. _“Crowley._ You ridiculous little devil. What am I to do with you?”

He shrugged, head lolling against Aziraphale’s thigh. “Anything you like, I suppose.”

“Right. Well, that decides it. I think I’d like that mouth of yours occupied,” Aziraphale said, eyes wide and interested as he valiantly fought down a stupid grin of his own. “If for no other reason than to keep you quiet.”

“I make no promises,” Crowley countered, hands snaking up to slip into the waistband of the angel’s breeches. “Here, or d’you want to move?”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, then paused a moment as he considered. “It is a very comfortable chair.”

Crowley tugged the breeches down Aziraphale’s hips, then raised up his knees to pull them all the way off. He bit the inside of his cheek as he caught a glimpse of the shiny pink folds nestled between the angel’s legs, looking away to add the breeches to the tidy yet slightly drooled-on stack of clothes he’d had his face on earlier.

“It’s been a while since your hair has been this short,” Aziraphale said while Crowley’s head was turned. “The way it looks now reminds me of the way you wore it in Rome.”

Saying it then would have felt more natural than breathing, exhaling his truth like a smoke ring, lighter than air and impossible to catch once said.

_“Think I loved you even then,”_ he could have said, and it would have felt so right.

_“It’s been so long since I’ve known true north,”_ he could have said. _“Stars don’t guide me anymore. My compass only points east.”_

He couldn’t say any of that, so he looked back and let the sight of the angel’s body in the lamplight steal his breath away.

Aziraphale looked so… so blessedly _biteable,_ each plump curve of him on display waking up the hungry reptilian instincts that screamed at Crowley to wrap himself around the angel and get his mouth on him. He actually had to waste a moment of time to pause, eyes glued the stretch marks that striped Aziraphale’s thighs and belly, and yell at his idiot snake brain to calm down and let him get on with it already, since _apparently, yeah, they got to do that now._ No need to fling himself at Aziraphale and start trying to unhinge his bloody jaw. He could do this like a reasonable person and approach it with technique and skill. He was good with his tongue, and Aziraphale deserved only the best.

The angel was sitting with his shoulders back and spine straight, almost like he was at attention if not for the anticipatory look in his eyes and the way his hands were fidgeting on top of his knees. Those were pressed together, demure and poised like he was sitting for a painting. _Principality in Repose, Awaiting Ravishment,_ it might have been called. Completed 1799 by A. Crowley. Mixed media—memories, pathetic emotional responses, and bodily fluids. Burned eternally into the artist’s bloody eyelids for his private collection of wank fodder.

He put his hands over Aziraphale’s fingers. Leaned in close and kissed the backs of them. “Are you ready?” He asked. His voice was barely audible.

“Please.”

Aziraphale slid his hands out from beneath Crowley’s, dragging them higher up to grip at his own thighs. He left Crowley’s hands exactly where they’d been on his knees—a clear invitation, and how could Crowley possibly deny him? Watching the angel’s face for any sign of hesitation, Crowley pulled Aziraphale’s knees apart and spread his thighs, wide enough to part the soft lips of his cunt, wide enough to see how— _fuck_ —how wet he looked already.

He started off slow and gentle, dragging quiet little moans out of the angel with broad strokes of his tongue everywhere but his clit. No need to overwhelm him right at the start. The first time he touched it, painting a loose arc around the sides of it with just the tip of his tongue, he was thrilled to hear Aziraphale gasp. It didn’t take long before his stiff posture collapsed, his head thunking against the padded back of the armchair with a sigh.

“Crowley—” Aziraphale breathed. His fingers kissed Crowley’s, the tips of them brushing as Aziraphale squeezed the tops of his own thighs.

In response, Crowley began to flick his tongue faster. Aziraphale’s hips rolled, his breathing grew faster, and Crowley thrilled at the way the tables had turned, the fact that Aziraphale was now the one coming undone and that _he_ was the one who’d caused it. The angel was so responsive, so eager to chase his pleasure, and he’d chosen Crowley to be the one who got to give it to him. When he found his face pinned between angelic thighs, sucking at his clit as Aziraphale whined and writhed beneath him, he had the thought that people shouldn’t be allowed to call fun things _“Heavenly”_ anymore. The term ought to be banned as the propaganda it was. Crowley had been in Heaven, and this was unquestionably better.

“I remember,” he heard Aziraphale say, his voice muffled by the press of those two soft thighs against his ears. “You liked... you said you liked it when I touched your hair.”

Crowley felt fingers brush the top of his head, hesitant and questioning. He nodded as best he could, then remembered the signal Aziraphale had requested he use earlier. _Once for yes, twice for no._ He wrapped his arms around the underside of the angel's knees and squeezed his legs against the sides of his face, belatedly remembering that he still had his glasses on and should be careful of any poking of an accidental sort.

Regardless, it seemed that Aziraphale had gotten the message. With a shuddering breath, he slipped both hands into Crowley's hair, stroking and scratching his scalp with those polished nails in a way that set Crowley's nerves alight. For a few moments they rocked together, Crowley following the rhythm Aziraphale set for him with his hands, licking and sucking at the angel's clit in time with each gentle rub and squeeze. Then... well, he assumed that he must have done something the angel really enjoyed, because Aziraphale's hands clenched into fists, pulling deliciously at Crowley's hair even as he spread his legs and held Crowley's face closer against the soft, wet folds of his cunt. Arousal pooled in Crowley's belly, hot and needy, and he felt himself moan around the suddenly longer, forking tongue in his mouth.

Fuck.

_Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck._

Crowley pushed against the angel's hands, breaking their hold on his hair as he scrabbled backwards, his hand covering his mouth.

“Ssssssorry,” he hissed from behind his fingers. Stupid bloody snake tongue, making him hiss. Forking when it had no business forking.

“Crowley, what's wrong?” Aziraphale asked, sitting forwards. He disheveled and flushed with pleasure, the picture of decadence even as concern furrowed his brow, and _fuck,_ Crowley just wanted to kiss him, just wanted to lean back in and taste him and feel the way he came apart on Crowley's tongue—

Which, of course, he couldn't do. Not unless he got his fool of a corporation back under control. If Aziraphale would still want this. If he hadn't crossed a line.

“My thung,” he began, garbling the word like he'd just gotten in from tongue-fucking a hornet's nest.

Great. _Great._ It was always a bit of a gamble when his tongue got away from him. Sometimes it just forked a bit at the end, which was usually pretty manageable. Other times he got this thin little whip of a thing, like a snake tongue scaled up to fit the proportions of a human mouth. That one that made it a lot harder to talk but it was at least able to fully fit inside his mouth when not in use. This one... this was option three. Human tongue scaled up to fit snake proportions. Big long nasty thing. Still forked on the end, of course. Forget tying a knot in a cherry stem, he’d probably capable of tying his cravat on with this one when it got to full size, _which it would not, because he was going to handle it._

“Crowley, are you hurt?”

He shook his head. “No, m’fine, sssssorry, sss’just…” All the words he could think of to explain were sibilant enough to reduce him to a hissing mess. Instead, he raised his other hand, the one not covering his mouth, and held up two fingers. Once he knew Aziraphale was watching, he prized them apart into a vee—a gesture which he realized a bit late looked a lot more insulting than he’d intended, though Aziraphale looked more confused than upset.

“Do you… oh! Are you saying your tongue forked?”

Crowley nodded, feeling the shame rise up and coil in his throat.

“Is that all?”

Is that—is that _bloody all!_ His body had only started shifting without his permission, going all weird and demonic before he could stop it. Had—had _touched_ Aziraphale with it like that _whilst engaged in oral congress._ Without asking him first, or, Hell. Without even any _warning._ Aziraphale would be more than justified if he kicked Crowley out of his shop and told him not to ever come back, or, _fuck,_ if he decided to smite him.

But instead of any of that, Aziraphale was just sitting there in his chair looking calmly debauched, breath coming in deep, slow pants as he stared down with those heavy-lidded eyes, legs still held open like he was—oh.

“Tha’s all,” Crowley said, speaking as slowly and clearly as possible. His eyes kept being drawn back to the slick-shiny mess he’d been making, the unfinished work of making the angel come undone. “I can… fix it.”

Aziraphale swallowed. “Do you… have to?”

_Oh._

He wanted to ask about a million questions, starting with, _“are you very, very, entirely sure, because this seems like the kind of moment where I’m likely to ruin everything.”_ But it was just… just so fucking hard to talk right now, and not just because his tongue was different, because if he let himself calm down a bit he could get used to speaking around the shape of it in his mouth. It was all just so very much to try to deal with at once, all the confusion and the fear and the shame choking him from within, and also, _also_ he was extremely aroused on top of all of the rest, making it terribly difficult to think.

Instead of letting himself succumb to panic, Crowley focused on what he knew. He’d been having fun having sex. _Aziraphale_ had been having fun, and seemed disinclined to want to stop, even though Crowley’s tongue was weird right now. Aziraphale knew it, and he hadn’t been pushed away. The angel even seemed _curious_ about—about how he was, like this, which was…

Good. This was something he could work with. He knew, objectively, that a longer tongue like this could feel very, _very_ good wrapped around one’s cock—he’d never tried it with another person, obviously, but Crowley was nearly six thousand years old, bendy, and easily bored. He hadn’t gotten around to trying it when he was wearing any other Efforts, but he assumed it would probably feel just as good on (in?) a cunt. He could extrapolate what he knew about entirely human-shaped oral sex and just kind of… shift it around to make use of the extra length and forking. Make it… make it worth the experiment. Make it worth doing this again sometime.

But he needed to make sure first. Get the go ahead, the confirmation. Make sure he wasn’t reading into this something that wasn’t there, make sure he hadn’t misunderstood. That he wasn’t about to make a huge mistake and hurt someone he loved more than anything, more than he’d loved Her even before She cast him out.

Crowley took Aziraphale’s hand and squeezed. The angel looked down at their hands for a moment, confused, then understanding lit up his face. He squeezed back once, firm and clear, and said, “Oh. Yes, Crowley dear. Please.”

Heart hammering harder than it had any business doing, Crowley bowed his head and pressed a kiss to Aziraphale’s mons, that spit-soaked thatch of hair scraping softly at his lips. Almost at once, Aziraphale relaxed into his touch, head falling back against the seat with a sigh as Crowley offered a tentative lick, the forks of his tongue sliding on either side of the angel’s clit.

“This feels incredible,” Aziraphale said, giving a luxurious stretch as he slid even lower in the armchair.

That gave him all the encouragement he needed to pick up the pace, working his way up to the rhythm he’d found before he’d pulled away and stopped. His tongue was dexterous and strong, almost like a pair of nubby fingers, both ends capable of moving independently. He learned that Aziraphale liked it when he rubbed him with the tips of his forks, and that he _really_ liked it when he nestled his clit in the cleft of the split, squeezed from the sides, and sucked. That second trick had been an accidental discovery, but for fuck’s sake, the _wail_ the angel made when he did it the first time was enough to ensure a repeat performance. As many encores as he bloody wanted.

He dipped his tongue lower, making an offer. Tracing around the wet rim of the angel’s entrance with the tips of it, the taste of his slick bursting bright and sharp into his mouth. No penetration, nothing without Aziraphale’s go-ahead, but he’d thought about last time, about that inn room in Paris, how the angel had begged him—no, _demanded_ that Crowley fuck that pretty cunt of his. How he’d moaned as Crowley had sunk his cock into him down to the root. Maybe—maybe this would be something he’d like, too.

By the way Aziraphale’s hips bucked beneath him, like he was trying to spear himself on Crowley’s tongue, Crowley assumed he’d guessed correctly.

“Yes—yes, _please._ Fuck me.” Aziraphale slid his hands into Crowley’s hair again, squeezed his thighs on either side of his face. Holding him. Drawing him in. He wrapped his arms up and over Aziraphale’s legs, squeezing back and thrilling at the soft, plush give of him.

Crowley didn’t need to be told twice. Aziraphale had been gracious enough earlier to show him some of the ways he liked to be touched and Crowley replicated them as best he could. He dipped just the tip of his tongue inside, fucking him with shallow thrusts that teased more than they satisfied. Pushing the forks of his tongue apart to stretch his cunt open just enough to make him want more. Pulling out sometimes just to lick a broad stroke across his swollen clit. Just so he could hear Aziraphale shudder with pleasure when he pushed back in.

Aziraphale’s hands fisted in his hair, pleasure-pain sparking across Crowley’s scalp and going straight down to his own achingly empty cunt. Probably dripping on the fucking floorboards by now, not that he bothered to check. His eyes flicked up to the dildo sitting beside the chair on the end table. It would be the work of a simple demonic miracle to snap his fingers and have it appear beneath him, to lower himself down and fuck himself on it as he fucked his angel. Then, a vision appeared in his imagination of him missing his mark, accidentally stabbing himself right in his unlubricated arsehole, and having to pause everything again so he could heal himself…

No. No, there were better ways. Less dangerous ways.

He shifted his grip on the angel’s legs, tucking his hands up under his knees. Pausing his thorough tongue fucking so Aziraphale wouldn’t be taken by surprise, squeezing his thighs to get his attention. Aziraphale lifted his head up, looking adorably dazed and groggy.

The angel let out a delighted squeak as Crowley tossed his legs over his shoulders and dragged his arse to the edge of the chair. This morning, the chair wouldn’t have been deep enough for Aziraphale to lay flat on his back in it, but it was smart enough to stretch itself to make room. Crowley had pulled that bloody cream monstrosity through the fabric of space itself to bring it here, and it knew he would not hesitate to send it to whatever Hell existed for tacky furniture if it failed him.

_“Fuck_ —Crowley!” Aziraphale swore, grabbing onto the arm rests and clinging to them for dear life. “Fuck— _fuck me._ ”

He obeyed with more enthusiasm than he thought he’d ever shown following an order in his entire damned life, or even in the bit before all the damning happened. His tongue was longer now, able to coil and twist and slither as he fucked his angel deeper, his dominant hand coming up to rub circles into Aziraphale’s clit. His other hand dropped to his own cunt, two fingers slipping inside with ease.

It wouldn’t be long now, not for him at least. The second orgasm always came quickly when he had this Effort, and he felt like he was getting close already. True to his prediction, he soon found himself clenching around his own fingers with a muffled groan, breath huffing hot and ragged against Aziraphale’s cunt as he struggled to keep up the frantic pace he had built to. Aziraphale followed not long after, the wooden chair frame creaking under his vise-grip hands as he arched his back. The soft, star-hot clench of his body around Crowley’s tongue came in waves, faster than the twisting of his hips and smooth like silk. Crowley fucked him through it, massaging the underside of his thigh with his free hand until the aftershocks passed.

When all that was left was that post-coital glow, Crowley pulled his face out of Aziraphale’s cunt, resting his head on the pillow of his leg as his tongue contracted back into its more familiar shape. There was a faint ache to his jaw, to the muscle that anchored his tongue to his mouth, and he rubbed his cheeks to soothe it away, the pads of his fingers sliding over the faint stubble with barely a scrape. Satan, but he’d been sloppy with it, and it took until he actually touched his own face to notice just how fucking soaked he was. There was spit and slick slathered all the way down his chin and dripping down his neck, on his nose, dripped onto his _chest._ Both his hands, too, of course. And his cunt, all the way back to his crack. He wouldn’t be surprised if he blinked and found out his eyelids were wet.

Crowley couldn’t remember a time when he’d been so happy. He was content to stay here for the rest of his life, drenched like he’d just come in from the rain, on his knees looking Aziraphale’s well-fucked cunt and knowing that he’d been the one to make lov—to fuck him.

Aziraphale’s hand patted awkwardly at the top of his head. “Crowley?”

“Mmmm?”

“What time is it?”

“Hm?”

The angel shifted in his once again normal-sized chair, looking over the armrests at the floor. “Crowley, would you be a dear and fetch me my pocket watch? I think it ended up… somewhere over by the books.”

Crowley spotted it. It wasn’t very far away, close enough to reach with a lean, and true to Aziraphale’s guess was on top of one of the stacks of books the angel had been organizing before this whole afternoon turned sideways and wonderful. He’d remembered the stacks being closer, though, and as he grabbed the watch he spared a thought to wonder if Aziraphale had miracled them out of the way when he’d tackled Crowley to the ground, or if the books had moved themselves out of self-preservation.

He passed the watch back to the angel, who was still mostly slumped over if nominally upright again. Aziraphale flicked it open and gasped.

“Gracious, how did it get so late?”

The words landed like lead weights in his stomach. He’d assumed, vaguely, that he’d be kicked out at some point, but he didn’t think it would be this soon. He’d wanted—it didn’t matter. They weren’t _together._ If what Aziraphale wanted from their new Arrangement was for them to fuck and then go their own ways, Crowley could manage that. He could—he should be on top of it, really. Should anticipate it. He’d made rules for himself for exactly this kind of thing. _“Never stick around long enough to make him ask you to leave,”_ that had been one of them, with an addendum of _“leave by dawn”_ as a backup guideline in case Aziraphale was too polite to tell him to fuck off.

Not tonight, though. Crowley was good at picking up hints, and the angel wasn’t exactly being subtle. Well. Nothing for it.

“It’s already half nine,” he continued, like he really thought he needed to drive the point home. Like he was oblivious to the sharp ache behind Crowley’s ribs.

“Yeah,” Crowley said vaguely, rising to his still-wobbly legs. He waved a hand and cleaned them both up.

“Thank you, dear,” Aziraphale said, looking up at him with an unfairly soft smile on his face.

He kept talking, but Crowley wasn’t really paying attention as he was on the panic-tinged edges of an internal debate about the best way to make himself less naked. Should he burn a miracle to dress himself so he could get out of here faster, or would be able to get away with lingering here long enough to do it the human way? Then, Aziraphale stood up too. He stretched—also unfairly soft and adorable—then wrapped Crowley up in a hug that was as delightful as it was surprising. Even more surprising was the way he kissed him, slow and thorough and in no hurry, entirely snapping him out of his concentration.

“…What?” He managed to ask once they’d broken apart.

“I asked if you wanted something to drink. I think it’s late enough now that we can get well and truly sozzled without raising any eyebrows, mm?”

Crowley paused, some mostly-vowel sound escaping his mouth. He realized it was open and snapped his jaw shut, back teeth clenched as he considered his options. He really ought to get out of here while things were still friendly and comfortable between them. Shouldn’t wait until Aziraphale got tired of him lounging about and had to shoo him out in earnest. He’d been with him for—gosh, twelve hours already. But… well, Aziraphale had offered, hadn’t he? And Crowley was in no hurry to leave. He could handle himself, extricate himself from the bookshop with his dignity intact. Before dawn, to be safe.

“Sure,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale kissed him again like that answer had pleased him.

Aziraphale’s idea of post-shag drinking was one Crowley could get behind, although he did find parts of it a bit silly, such as the fact that Aziraphale insisted they put clothes on again to do it. Not their regular clothes, either. No. He wanted them to wear special post-shag drinking clothes, ones that were, in his words, _“marvelously comfortable and wickedly decadent.”_ This turned out to be some of the clothing he’d uncovered in one of his crates.

The angel wore some flouncy, frilly dressing gown that shouldn’t have been able to look attractive on anyone but that still had Crowley ogling him, lacy monstrosity though he was. The bastard dressed Crowley in that eighty-four-year-old blue satin banyan he’d teased him about earlier. While he grudgingly admitted that it was, in fact, extremely comfortable, there was something very strange about wearing it, too. For one, blue wasn’t his color. For two… well, it was Aziraphale’s, wasn’t it? That made something warm and annoyingly domestic start trying to crawl its way out of him, so he tied the banyan scandalously low around his hips and tried to drown that feeling in wine.

He could hardly fail to notice just how bloody _touchy_ Aziraphale was like this, always hugging and kissing him, pulling him into his lap for another bit of cuddling. Had anyone asked, Crowley would have blamed his lack of complaining on the alcohol, on the bliss he was riding on the tail of two excellent orgasms. But of course, as there always was, there was more to it than that. He clung to Aziraphale for as long as he fucking could, absorbing affection from him like a sad, dry plant, hoping that Aziraphale wouldn’t pick up how absolutely gone on him Crowley had become.

Crowley lost track of time for a while, the normal measurements forgotten in the heady, happy buzz they’d built up as they talked and laughed and kissed. For a while, he’d tried to keep up with the night by counting bottles, but after about three he was drunk enough to have forgotten why it mattered what time it was. The angel’s lap was warm, and Crowley could twist himself up into a comfortable tangle and just be held, and wasn’t that enough?

“S’funny,” Aziraphale began after a long, sleepy silence. He prodded curiously at the rounded swell of his own belly where his dressing gown had been pulled open by Crowley’s clumsy hands.

“Mmm?” Crowley prompted, the sound a bit muffled where his face was pressed against Aziraphale’s stomach.

“M’an’angel,” the angel declared, momentarily serious before a laugh escaped him.

Between Aziraphale’s prodding and his laughter, Crowley’s pillow seemed to be the target of frequent disruption. He sat up, surreptitiously wiping away the damp spot on Aziraphale’s skin where his mouth had apparently been drooling on him.

“How’s that funny?” He asked. “You’ve always been an angel.”

Aziraphale nodded, pressing his hands into his soft middle, gathering up two handfuls of angel tummy. “I have skin.”

“Assssstute.” Amused as he was, Crowley did not immediately notice his slip.

His hissing laugh earned him a half-hearted swat. “You know what I mean,” Aziraphale scolded through his smile. “I have all this _stuff._ Legs and things.”

“I like your legs,” Crowley admitted, shifting around so he could straddle him. “And your ssstuff.” He noticed that one and bit his lip, but Aziraphale either didn’t catch it or ignored it.

“You have legs, too.” Another laugh. A kiss to the tip of Crowley’s nose. “Sometimes. But not all the time. Sometimes you’re a ver—a very wicked serpent.”

Crowley caught both of Aziraphale’s hands in his own and kissed the backs of them until he stopped making those ridiculous wiggly gestures with his fingers. “Dunno why you think I’ve got wiggly fingers as a snake. Don’t have any hands.”

“That’s it!” Aziraphale cried out, almost startling Crowley out of his lap. “Yes. _Exactly._ Temporary hands!” He kissed Crowley right on the lips and pulled away with a satisfied look on his face. Crowley, for his part, was dazed and happy but also very lost.

“Temporary?” He repeated, cocking his head as though the change of angle would help him see what Aziraphale meant.

The angel pulled his hands free and draped his arms over Crowley’s shoulders. Warm, soft, heavy. Strong. “Not really mine. Or yours, I suppose. A loaner. Like your chair!” He gave a comfortable shimmy and settled further into the seat of the armchair. “But it _feels_ like it’s mine. Sometimes… sometimes feels like it’s _me.”_

Those arms hugged him closer, pressing them together chest-to-chest. Crowley held his breath, knowing his heart was about to start being all silly again, willing himself not to make some kind of sad sound like a whimper. Bad enough for his dignity he was being snuggled like this as a demon. Worse if he cried about it. Somewhere in the shifting, Crowley’s face ended up nestled against the side of Aziraphale’s neck. He got the bright idea to start kissing it, open-mouthed and slow. If anyone was going to be making noises, it was better if it were Aziraphale.

Aziraphale wiggled in appreciation, but kept talking with that familiar wine-soaked tone that suggested he was moments away from making some point he was sure would be profound, if only he could grab ahold of the slippery thing.

“When I first got incorpreat—incorpop—got bodied. You know. _Upstairs.”_ Aziraphale’s voice dropped to an exaggerated whisper. Crowley felt him shift, knew he was looking up at the ceiling. “They sort of. Tucked all the other bits up. Made me to fit. A quart into a pint pot, or…” A low chuckle, self-conscious but warm. “… Or folding up a camel to thread your needle.”

“Whassit got to do with my hands?”

“When you’re touching me, it makes me feel… It’s… _ah_ —” Aziraphale cut himself off with a gasp as Crowley’s hand slipped under his robe to rub against one of his nipples. “It’s a very—very human thing, isn’t it?”

“Human?”

“What we’re doing. Our—well, the bodies.”

Calling their bodies “very” human seemed like a bit of a stretch, given how much energy they both spent trying to blend in. Aziraphale couldn’t know every demonic quirk in Crowley’s physiology, but he knew more than most people. He knew about the tongue and seemed to like what it could do.

“Is it?” Crowley purred, nipping at Aziraphale’s collarbone. He was curious to see where the angel was going with this. “Tell me.”

As he looked back up to face him, Aziraphale raised a hand and cupped his jaw. Crowley tried not to look too desperate, not to lean in so quickly to the feel of the heat from that palm against his skin. He almost succeeded.

“Well, I’m touching you…” Aziraphale began, staring down at his own hand.

“Yes, good. I like this part.” He couldn’t help but give a laugh. He felt it rumbling low in his throat, mingling with something like a confession he hoped the laugh wouldn’t knock loose.

“But they’re not… they’re not _us,_ though are they? These bodies. They’re—muscle, bone. Nerves. Blood. And we’re just… just sort of, well…”

“Shoved inside,” Crowley finished, his voice flat.

“Yes! It’s just strange to think,” Aziraphale said in that voice of his that he used when he’d found a loophole, running the pad of a warm thumb against Crowley’s lips. “I’m not really touching you. It’s not even really you I’d be touching, either. Just… Just our corporations. Like we’re a… a pair of humans.”

“But not… us.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

As Aziraphale kissed him, Crowley shut his eyes tight behind his glasses and tried to put it out of mind, tried not to think of anything but his lips and their tongues.

He had everything he thought he could never have, or at least enough of it that the rest shouldn’t matter. He should be happy. He should be blissed out of his mind. There was an old feeling, an ache inside the core of him that he’d become familiar with over the centuries, and it should be gone by now. He’d gotten what he wanted. Aziraphale’s tongue was in his damn mouth, and yet he still felt the sting of the rejection under the pleasure of it. He felt… he felt hollowed out. Scraped clean, left raw. Held close yet pushed away. It wasn’t right, it didn’t feel like it should be possible, and yet. Ever the fucking contradiction, he was.

He had Aziraphale in his arms, they were—well, he supposed he didn’t know quite what they were. Aziraphale hadn’t named this thing, and Crowley didn’t want to be the one to broach that subject, but they’d fucked. More than once, with plans for more in the future. On Thursday, apparently, and maybe again tonight if they didn’t pass out first. _“Lovers”_ didn’t feel like something he could say, and all the other, cruder names for it that made his skin a feel bit itchy. They were _something,_ at least, and something was better than nothing.

But they weren’t _them._

He understood it a bit more now, and he supposed that would be useful information in the future. Understanding how, exactly, Aziraphale had convinced himself that anything they were doing was something they could do. It would help him learn not to fuck this up. Help him learn how to keep it in his greedy fingers as long as he could.

Crowley had been right, then, six years ago when he’d first guessed this was strictly physical for Aziraphale. All just… just a matter of sensation and pleasure. But Crowley hadn’t realized the extent of it. Sex, to Aziraphale, wasn’t just a thing they did with their bodies. It was less than that. It was a thing _their bodies_ did. Not them. They— they were an angel and a demon wrapped up in flesh, and no matter how close they got, no matter what they did… _they_ didn’t touch each other. It was just their bodies, their corporations. It was playing at being human, and Aziraphale had asked in that twisty, roundabout way of his for Crowley not to remind him.

It didn’t mean a thing. Not to Aziraphale. Not like it meant to Crowley.

But…

But Crowley was nothing if he wasn’t an optimist. Alright, so, yes. He’d had something confirmed for him that stung quite a bit. Hadn’t been _new_ information, though. Hadn’t been _unexpected._ He’d never thought it was very likely that Aziraphale would love him back in the same way, but he _did_ know that they were friends. Best friends. Best friends who fuck each other. On the floor, a lot of the time. Apparently. Because apparently, it’s good enough sex that Aziraphale—prissy angel of creature comforts that he is—is eager enough for it that he’s willing to pounce on Crowley given just the slightest provocation and shag his brains out without a thought spared for cushions or bedding. And that’s… that is…

Flattering, yeah. Definitely something he could work with. Fine. Great, even. Better than anything he thought he’d ever get. He’d wanted to fuck Aziraphale almost as long as he’d wanted to love him, and if Aziraphale wanted only one of those things from him, Crowley could do that. He’d give that angel everything he wanted, show him everything he was ever curious about, right under their bosses’ noses. He hadn’t known it before, but he’d been practicing for this for nearly six millennia, learning with each seduction how to be the best at this he could.

For as long as Aziraphale wanted him, Crowley would be right here. He’d make him happy for as long as he could. Keep an eye on him. Keep him safe.

It would be enough. For as long as they had, it would be enough. And Crowley would be happy, too.

He should have sobered up and left right then, gone back to his flat to lick his wounds in peace. But… but he found he didn’t want to. As much as it hurt sometimes to love him, there wasn’t anywhere he’d rather be than wherever Aziraphale was. So, he stayed. Basked in the warmth of him. Drank more, kissed more, drowned that little twinge of hurt under the pleasure of wine-stained lips and soft, clumsy fingers. Let himself relax in the arms that held him and stroked his hair, and pretended he didn’t want anything more.

When Crowley next opened his eyes, vaguely shocked that he had fallen asleep at all, he saw that there was light on the bookshop floor again, pale and pink and muted. Dawn. Time to leave. He hauled himself up out of Aziraphale's lap and made some kind of excuse about needing to water his fern before dressing himself with a thought and heading for the exit.

In a rare turn of events, Aziraphale gave him a new rule for his list that Crowley didn't have to infer, spoken plainly in his own words. “If you would—out the back door, please. It's so late, or early, rather...”

Crowley paused by the storage room door. “Wouldn't want the neighbors to think Mr. Fell had a rent boy over,” he said, voice even. He did not have to wait long to see how Aziraphale would respond.

“Or a burglar,” the angel shot back, then flicked his eyes down to the chair Crowley had stolen for him. The chair he was still sitting in, prim as anything in his frilly dressing gown. “Though I suppose that part is true.”

“Mind if I put your crooked Alderman down in my next report?” Crowley asked, backing out onto the shop floor.

“Please do. And... Thursday?”

Crowley said nothing, his throat strangely tight, but he nodded at the angel before he turned away.

Aziraphale's response was quiet, but he heard it all the same before the back door shut behind him.

“Mind how you go.”  


* * *

  
He came again on Thursday evening, still reeling a bit that this was a thing that they could _plan in advance._ By then, the upstairs windows had all been replaced and the shop floor was dominated by towering, empty shelves. They were every bit as sturdy as they looked, given that Aziraphale’s first request that night was that Crowley fuck him up against one of them. On subsequent evenings they would also find that Aziraphale’s new couch and desk were every bit as sturdy as the shelves.

The armchair, the thing he was supposedly invited over to deal with, the whole _pretext_ for the Thursday visit, was gone by the time he arrived. He didn’t know what had happened to it, and he hadn’t asked. He supposed he didn’t care. It was an ugly old thing anyway, and they’d probably stained it. Why should he care if Aziraphale got rid of it? They’d both been very clear about the fact that it did _not_ count as a housewarming gift.

As for that… He'd thought very briefly about giving Aziraphale a potted plant, but it had felt too presumptuous, too close to looking like he was trying to move himself in. He settled instead on a chessboard, which slipped in with the rest of the angel's Thursday morning furniture delivery in a rather devilish coincidence. It arrived without any kind of note or accompanying explanation, but he trusted that Aziraphale would understand when he saw that one of the black pawns had horns and one of the white ones had wings carved into the back.

Crowley rehearsed in his mind, as he often did when he found himself idle after doing something that could be construed as less than wicked behavior, how he would spin this story were he to be hauled before his superiors and demanded to provide an explanation for himself. _“Surely you see the symbolism, Lord Beelzebub,”_ he'd muttered to himself while watering his African violets. _“It's a threat. A warning to my adversary of the war to come.”_ He even spun the story a bit when he told it to himself. It was selfish, of course, to give someone a gift best enjoyed with a partner.

In the months that followed, they established a pattern. Outside of the shop, they acted as if they were nothing more to one another than casual acquaintances. Inside the shop, once the doors were locked and the curtains were drawn, Crowley was able to indulge Aziraphale’s endless appetites for fun and pleasure. He’d always leave before dawn, always out the door to the alleyway behind the shop so as to avoid drawing attention from the angel’s Soho neighbors.

Every time he came over, Aziraphale showed him the progress he’d made on the bookshop that week. It was a strange thing, watching that empty space fill up, watching it grow and change from visit to visit, becoming more of a proper shop by the day. He didn’t think he’d ever watched something of Aziraphale’s change that quickly, though Crowley knew that the speed of his progress would likely only last until the shop was finished to his liking. If he knew Aziraphale—and he felt like he did, better than most, even—he expected that what the angel was doing here was building himself something like a hiding place, someplace calm and sedate he could withdraw into and weather the flow of time. Crowley couldn’t fault him for that, not really. Humans were developing faster these days than they ever had before, and even Crowley himself struggled to keep up at times.

Watching the bookshop start to come to life around him did something a bit strange to him, watching Aziraphale take something damaged and abandoned and hollow and through sheer stubbornness and will turn it into something unquestionably better. Unquestionably his.

Repairs dragged on longer than expected and Aziraphale refused to expedite most of them, though Crowley couldn’t tell if it was always due to a fear of being chided for a misuse of miracles or if the angel was just having fun getting the shop ready the human way. It took nine months, nearly ten, but by the end of a sweltering summer and the return of the first chilly nights of a new autumn, Aziraphale declared that the shop was ready to open. Picked a date, sent word to all his literary contacts and new human friends. Met with the owner of that little café to see about having his grand opening catered.

And Crowley realized that he was… proud. Not of the shop, really. He’d had absolutely nothing to do with it outside of making himself a bother while Aziraphale did his best to get unpacked. But he _was_ proud, because what Aziraphale had done here was to build himself a home. Sometimes Crowley found himself daydreaming that he might find one, too. Not that it would ever happen, of course. It was unwise to grow too attached to places and people when you work for Hell and can be summoned across the globe at any moment.

But Aziraphale… he’d managed it. He’d found himself someplace permanent, some place with good bones and good light and a neighborhood around it that he liked and that liked him back, and he made it his own. Filled it with books and art and all the debris of a life lived over millennia. Immortal and timeless as he was, Aziraphale had taken ahold of a piece of the planet and declared that it was his and would change exactly how he wanted it to and no further.

How could Crowley see that and be anything but proud?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Continued Content Notes**  
>  Context spoilers for this chapter, should you like more information before reading:  
> Crowley and Aziraphale are both afraid of hurting one another by mistake. There is discussion of boundaries and consent (sexual and nonsexual), though as per the themes of this fic, they will both come away from this thinking that the other person has more boundaries than they actually do. All boundaries, perceived and real, are respected.  
> There is also a moment where Crowley’s tongue forks during sex without him meaning for it to, and he panics thinking Aziraphale hadn’t wanted to be touched with a snake tongue. There’s some pretty harsh self-directed shame, disgust, and blame that happens before Aziraphale lets him know that, nah, he’s totally down to have giant snake tongue sex.
> 
> As so much fiction does, especially when it comes to stuff in GO imo, this comes very close to some heavy queer themes without actually explicitly being “about” those issues. Just like Aziraphale’s journey in canon strongly parallels stories of coming out, being rejected by family for being queer, and learning to love one’s self, this chapter deals with things that feel very close to some real world issues while still having a barrier of fantasy between subject and reality. So many people in marginalized groups have been taught that their love, desire, and sexuality are wrong and bad, and that can translate into a deeply seated shame and fear that when we engage in sex or express sexual interest, we are acting as predators just by virtue of who we are.  
> My little lesbian ass can’t write much explicit GO fic without bringing in that aspect, apparently. :)  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> I think I like Thursday updates better, actually. They let me do my WIP Wednesday preview the day before uploading a new chapter instead of the day after. So, in that case: new chapter goes up **Thursday, September 3rd.** ~~Holy fuck, it’s September next week??? Where did August go???~~
> 
> Come say hi in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.


	8. Sanctuary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the fireplace burning behind him, wreathing him in flame as shadows danced across his face, the image he made spoke of Caravaggio, of Rubens, though Crowley knew no mortal would be able to put this to page. Aziraphale was strength wrapped in beauty, power tempered by mercy. A study in chiaroscuro, a real-life counterpart to all those silly ideas the humans had about angels… but on Aziraphale, it wasn’t silly. Looking at Aziraphale like this, it reminded Crowley that he was the only real angel out of the lot of them. He thought of the sword Aziraphale had once carried, the way that it burned. It was already gone by the time Crowley risked going up to the top of the wall, so he’d only ever seen it from a distance—was this how Aziraphale had looked back then?
> 
>  _Fuck._ Crowley didn’t understand how anyone could look at him and not see him for what he was: the best thing She ever made. The part that made all the rest of it worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Notes:** Crowley isn’t quite having a panic attack here, but he’s real dang close.  
> Also, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Crowley’s past partners.
> 
> Specific Sex Acts: Oral sex and hand jobs  
> Both Aziraphale and Crowley have penises. Penises for everyone! ~~Oodles of them. Pots.~~
> 
> If you’ve never experienced the deleted bookshop opening scene, or you have and just want a refresher, I’ve linked a scan of it [here](https://221blilli.tumblr.com/post/185506986009/im-not-saying-that-we-were-robbed-im-just) for your convenience.
> 
> If you like having a visual for the bookshop in front of you while you read, if you need a reference for your own fic writing endeavors, or if you just love the bookshop and want to pretend like you’re there, Lucia ([vialattea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vialattea/pseuds/vialattea) on Ao3 and [mochacoffee](https://mochacoffee.tumblr.com) on tumblr) made super detailed [floorplans](https://mochacoffee.tumblr.com/post/611550631327580160/i-created-a-3d-model-and-floor-plan-of) for it as well as a walkable [3D model](https://floorplanner.com/360vr/26984127-1583565189). Thanks for making these, Lucia. You are an actual factual angel.

**London, 1800**

It was cold in the alley behind the bookshop, and the seconds after Crowley knocked on the back door stretched on and on. He was holding on to that box of chocolates like a life preserver, his fingers chilled and stiff even through his leather gloves, and he was contemplating miracling the box inside if Aziraphale never answered.

He should have waited. Well. He _had_ waited, but only a few hours. Most of the day, a little bit into the night. But he should have been more patient and given it at least a full day before trying to turn up again, though the smart thing would have been to wait to get a note or something from Aziraphale confirming that they were in the clear. Confirming that Aziraphale even wanted to see him again, that he hadn’t found out what he’d done, how he’d overstepped and gone between Aziraphale and Heaven like he _knew_ Aziraphale would resent him for.

If it had even worked, if those bastards hadn’t taken him back Upstairs anyway, no matter what Crowley did to remind him it was better for everyone, them included, to keep Aziraphale here where he was happy. If he wasn’t knocking on the door of an empty bookshop, or one with that _fucking wanker_ Michael waiting inside to discorporate the first demon stupid enough to come sniffing around Heaven’s new London base. He should have waited, he should have—

The door opened, and though it was still dark inside, Crowley’s eyes were able to pick out the beige-cream shape of Aziraphale. The angel reached for him, dragged him inside by his lapels. Crowley had only a moment to think to apologize, to contemplate how to talk the angel down and try to salvage their friendship, the Arrangement, even if he’d ruined the rest of it.

Then, he found himself pressed against the double doors at the back of the shop, which had swung closed and locked themselves at the suggestion of an angelic miracle, and he was suddenly, _thoroughly_ being kissed. The brim of his hat was knocked down into his eyes, and then the wasn’t wearing a hat at all, and Crowley didn’t care how it had happened or where it had gotten off to. He had so much more to focus on, so many wonderful, overwhelming sensations. There was the faint taste of whiskey on Aziraphale’s lips, a remnant after sobering up, maybe, as those blue-grey eyes were piercing and clear. Aziraphale’s hands, heated and soft, were roaming across the sides of Crowley’s face. Thumbs brushing his stubble. Fingers warm against the too-cold shells of his ears.

“I thought,” Aziraphale said, drawing out his words a few at a time whenever he was able to pull his lips away, “I might not see you. For a while, at least.”

“S’alright?” Crowley asked, muffled.

Aziraphale laughed into Crowley’s mouth, his little huffs of their shared breaths sending a pang of arousal straight through him. “More than, my dear.”

He wasn’t sure which question Aziraphale had answered, wasn’t really even sure which one he’d even asked. It could have been, _‘Is it alright that I came back so soon?’_ But he could have just as easily been asking, _‘Is it alright I got involved at all?_

 _Is it alright that I get to keep you instead of letting them have you?_ Crowley thought desperately as he slipped his gloved fingers into Aziraphale’s curly hair. _I know you’ll choose them in the end, but is it alright that I made you wait a little longer before you do?_

That hadn’t been the question he’d wanted to ask, of that much he was certain. He hoped it hadn’t been the one Aziraphale had heard.

Aziraphale pulled away, but kept his hands on Crowley’s shoulders. Crowley had the strange thought that he might be about to suggest they dance. There was no music in the bookshop, no sound at all, really, except the sounds of their bodies and breath, though Crowley wouldn’t have minded. But Aziraphale didn’t move, not for one long moment, and all he did was stare at Crowley like he was inspecting him. Memorizing him, maybe, or trying to make a choice.

When he moved, it was sudden. Aziraphale wrapped those strong arms of his around Crowley’s body, one behind his neck and the other around his narrow waist. Pulled him in close, squeezing him like _Aziraphale_ was the one who was a little bit snake in an embrace that was just on the right side of crushing. Crowley brought his arms up, too, that box of chocolates bumping up awkwardly against the angel’s back. When Aziraphale let go, it was only to press Crowley back up against the door with his body, a hand between his head and the wood. He twisted a finger around one of the ends of Crowley’s cravat and slowly began to tug it loose.

“Are those for me?” Aziraphale asked, his eyes flicking back over his shoulder as his lips quirked a smile.

“Yeah,” Crowley said belatedly, still a bit dazed from the feeling of being hugged like that.

It had been almost nine years since that first time they fucked, seven since they first shared a night in his inn room in Paris. Nearly a full year now—ten months, but who was counting?—since Crowley made his excuses to come stay in London full time so he could come bother his adversary in his shop as often as they thought they could get away with. They’d been shagging at least once a week for the last _ten months,_ and he should be used to it by now. He should be used Aziraphale’s touch by now, but he _wasn’t._ Especially the casual touches. Those never failed to overwhelm him in a way he didn’t quite feel like examining.

“Chocolates,” he continued, trying to sound a bit less raw. He jostled the box for emphasis. “For the… for the opening. Thought you might like to celebrate.”

Aziraphale kissed Crowley’s forehead. “I think I might, but… later, perhaps?” Another kiss, this time to the corner of Crowley’s mouth. “And maybe upstairs?”

Crowley’s eyes wandered to staircase near the center of the shop floor, what little of it he could see over Aziraphale’s shoulder and behind a shelf. Over the past months, he’d watched the angel’s personal collection up on the mezzanine expand—in contrast to the browsing shelves downstairs which were, in true Aziraphale fashion, still half empty less than a week out from the shop’s opening to the public—but he’d never gone up there. Aziraphale kept telling him it wasn’t ready yet.

“Upstairs, yeah. Sure.”

“Do you… do you remember that little flat you had in Stockholm?” Aziraphale began, his tone all innocence despite his kiss-flushed lips and that positively hungry look in his eyes.

Hard to forget, really. That’s where he’d been living when his whole life changed. They’d both been assigned to Sweden in the dead of fucking winter, and Crowley had made a fool out of himself more than once on that trip. He’d decided to stay above a used bookshop like the world’s most pathetic sap, like one of those birds that lines their nest with pretty trash to try to lure another bird in so they can make bad bird decisions together.

He’d also slept alone in that flat for three weeks after Aziraphale had touched him for the first time and then fled in the night.

“I might,” he said.

“It isn’t… quite the same, but I managed to get myself a similar setup.”

“Really?” Crowley kept his voice low and level. “Well, I certainly hope yours is a bit warmer. I remember that one had quite a draft.”

Aziraphale’s voice took on an airy, clipped tone, though his words were still threaded through with tension. “Well, I should hope so. There’s a fireplace, and the upstairs windows are double glazed. I have also invested in a bed warmer, for when it’s particularly chilly out.”

“Very practical of you.”

Aziraphale leaned in close and pressed a kiss to Crowley’s temple. “Of course, that all seems a bit redundant,” he murmured, kissing lower, just under his jaw. “As I do not plan on letting you get cold.”

“Mmnyeh,” Crowley said, distracted by the growing hardness he could feel pressed against him where the angel had pinned him in with his hips.

“I want to check the wards and make sure all the curtains are drawn,” Aziraphale whispered. “Wait for me upstairs? The door won’t keep you out.”

Crowley nodded, closing his mouth after he realized his lips were still parted, and watched as Aziraphale disappeared into the stacks. He was moving slowly, trying to keep quiet, and Crowley followed suit as he crept towards the staircase. It was wrought iron and he feared for a moment that it would make his footfalls sound unacceptably loud, but it behaved itself without Crowley even having to spare a miracle.

The upper floor of the shop was dark, but there was a sliver of something brighter flickering in the gap beneath a door near the back. He followed it, and although the door was locked and warded, the handle turned beneath his hand just like Aziraphale promised. Crowley slipped inside and pulled it shut behind him, not wanting to let the light spill out for any longer than necessary.

He found himself in what must be Aziraphale’s bedroom. It was a small space, and plain, the ceiling sloping with the curve of the domed roof he was sure the angel had cajoled the building’s architecture into accommodating. It was also packed so full of furniture that there was very little space to walk around. Rather than making it feel cramped, however, this only made the room feel almost painfully cozy, and the light from the crackling hearth made even the shadows seem warm and inviting.

All of it was so very _Aziraphale_ that Crowley struggled not to laugh, noting with a strange tilting feeling in his chest that everything in here was either tartan, ruffled, or had wings carved into it—the cushioned rocking chair by the fire having apparently fallen victim to all three of Aziraphale’s dubious aesthetic preferences at the same time. There was yet another bookshelf in here, of course, and it was already packed to groaning with what Crowley recognized as some of the angel’s favorites.

It was the bed, though, that drew his attention more than anything else. Without even touching it, he could tell that Aziraphale had gotten himself a decadently comfortable feather mattress, and naturally had proceeded to weigh it down with far too many quilts and pillows, but he didn’t care. He was too busy looking at the precise tuck to the blankets and wondering if the angel had ever used it before tonight. Had he ever slept here? Would the pillows smell like him?

The door opened and shut behind him as Aziraphale slipped inside. The angel apparently had caught him staring, because he said, “My apologies about the bed. It was hard enough getting approval to set aside space here for a bedroom, to convince them I needed it to keep up appearances for the humans. You can imagine what they might have thought if I’d gotten something bigger.”

He was right, it was rather narrow, clearly designed to only sleep one. That did absolutely nothing to put Crowley off of it, though. Bed that small, they’d practically have to stack if they both wanted to get in. He almost wanted to send that micromanaging prick Gabriel flowers for giving Crowley such a fucking incredible stroke of luck.

“It’s fine,” Crowley said, looking between the way the angel’s hands were fluttering and the grin on his flushed face. Eagerness, then, instead of nerves. Maybe. He hoped. “I’m sure we can, uh, find a way to fit.”

Aziraphale bit his lip, his eyes briefly going a bit wide. “I’m sure we can figure something out, my dear.”

Crowley took a step closer, looking to cross that distance, then heard the sound of the chocolates rattling in the box in his hands. Right. He was still… still holding that. _Yep._

“Where would you like these?” He asked, lifting the box.

The little wrinkles at the corners of Aziraphale’s eyes made an appearance as he flashed Crowley a conspiratorial look. “Oh, by the bed, I think. I daresay we might need them later to regain our strength.”

“Planning on wearing me out?” Crowley asked, raising his eyebrows. He turned away, feeling Aziraphale’s eyes on him as he walked. He couldn’t help but run a teasing finger over the quilt on top of the bed as he passed it by, testing the give of the mattress through his leather gloves. Crowley stared at the wrinkle in the quilt left in the wake of his hand, quietly thrilling at the way something so carefully made up came undone at his touch.

“I’m… I’m not entirely sure I could,” Aziraphale said, his voice sounding tight. “I don’t know if anyone could.”

As Crowley set the box of chocolates down on the small table beside the headboard, he noticed a piece of furniture he’d missed when he first walked in. He found himself feeling oddly touched when he recognized the armchair that he’d brought Aziraphale on his first visit to the shop. He hadn’t realized the angel had kept it, and seeing it here with the rest of his fussy, perfect bedroom, Crowley wondered how he’d ever found it to be ugly.

Aziraphale had tucked away into the furthest back corner of the little bedroom between the wall and the bookshelf. It was positioned—intentionally, maybe—so it would be hidden partially from view from someone standing in the doorway. There was a blanket folded over the arm, a pair of books in the seat, and Crowley found himself smiling as he imagined Aziraphale himself tucked away here, too. If he didn’t sleep in the bed, was this where he spent his nights? The chair did have, he noticed, a clear view of the bed, and his imagination sped right on ahead of him to come up with additional uses they might put it to.

Behind him, he heard the soft sound of fabric brushing over skin, felt a faint shifting in the air. By the time he turned around, the miracle was finished. Aziraphale’s clothing was gone, from his high collar and fussy cravat all the way down to his shoes, his feet bare on the plush rug. In its place he was wearing that frilly dressing gown again, the one that was objectively frumpy and unattractive, and that Crowley had absolutely never referred to as “the snuggle robe” even in the privacy of his own thoughts.

There should have been absolutely no way he found that old thing as arousing as he did. It covered up almost as much as the angel’s regular outfit. Crowley thought he could probably blame it on overexposure, claim that it was only having an effect on him due to the fact that Aziraphale liked to wear it after shagging him stupid. That he’d been trained, quite against his will, to get turned on by the sight of a garment that would make anyone who wore it look like someone’s dotty old spinster aunt.

Only that wasn’t what Aziraphale looked like at all. Especially not now, with the fireplace burning behind him, wreathing him in flame as shadows danced across his face. The image he made spoke of Caravaggio, of Reubens, though Crowley knew no mortal would be able to put this to page. Aziraphale was strength wrapped in beauty, power tempered by mercy. A study in chiaroscuro, a real-life counterpart to all those silly ideas the humans had about angels… but on Aziraphale, it wasn’t silly. Looking at Aziraphale like this, it reminded Crowley that he was the only real angel out of the lot of them. He thought of the sword Aziraphale had once carried, the way that it burned. It was already gone by the time Crowley risked going up to the top of the wall, so he’d only ever seen it from a distance—was this how Aziraphale had looked back then?

 _Fuck._ Crowley didn’t understand how anyone could look at him and not see him for what he was: the best thing She ever made. The part that made all the rest of it worth it.

“Crowley?”

He closed his mouth. A moment later, it registered in his mind that it had been left open. Satan, he needed to get ahold of himself.

Aziraphale smiled at him, clearly preening under the attention. _Good._ He deserved a bit of preening, gorgeous fucking thing that he was.

“You’ve changed clothes,” Crowley observed, his mouth feeling a bit dry.

“I have,” Aziraphale replied, his smile stretching into something more like a smirk. “And more than my clothes. Would you like to see?”

Crowley nodded mutely, and Aziraphale stepped closer to him, close enough that their chests touched. The slight difference in their heights became wonderfully apparent as the angel tipped up his chin to kiss him, as Crowley felt Aziraphale’s nose bump against the bottom of his own. He also became acutely aware of how dressed he still was compared to Aziraphale. He hadn’t taken a single thing off yet—well, he’d lost the hat downstairs somewhere, but he was still wearing his bloody overcoat, and here he was, looking down the front of the angel’s robe and seeing that silver-blonde chest hair…

Aziraphale gathered up Crowley’s hands in his own and tugged off his leather gloves, finger by finger. Tossed those onto the top of the chest at the foot of the bed. He didn’t let go of his hands once they were bare, just held them close to his belly as he rubbed warm circles into the backs of them with the pads of his thumbs.

“Your hands feel so cold, my dear.”

“I can warm them,” Crowley offered.

The angel only smiled and shook his head. He rubbed Crowley’s fingers between his own, brisk and matter of fact, keeping his eyes on their hands as he worked the warmth back into them. Aziraphale only looked back up when he raised them to his lips and breathed into them, his breath curling hot and damp against Crowley’s chilly skin. He shivered, knowing full well it had nothing to do with the cold.

“There we go,” Aziraphale said, voice barely a whisper, and pressed kiss to each of Crowley’s palms. He let one hand drop back down to Crowley’s side, but kept the other cradled to his chest. “Now, are you ready for me to show you what I have for you tonight?”

“Yeah,” Crowley answered, acutely aware of the way his pulse was jumping beneath the angel’s fingers. “Show me.”

Aziraphale wrapped his arm around Crowley’s shoulders, pulling them even closer together—chest to chest, thigh to thigh, their feet touching where they shuffled to close the distance. The angel’s face was tucked in over Crowley’s shoulder, his hot breath warming his cheek and ear. Crowley’s face was pressed into Aziraphale’s neck, breathing in the scent of him on each inhale.

Ever so slowly, Aziraphale guided his hand lower and lower. Down the broad plane of his chest, along the side of his soft belly, through the split in his robe. Crowley felt his fingertips graze the downy, stretch-marked surface of one of Aziraphale’s thighs, and then his palm came into contact with still more heat. He closed his fingers around Aziraphale’s cock, relishing the way it twitched in his grip at the sensation. Savoring the sharp breath Aziraphale took beside his ear.

Pressed together like they were, he had no way of looking at it, not yet at least, so he explored the angel’s cock through touch. Aziraphale was hard already, his skin velvet-soft and burning against Crowley’s own, and it was heavy in his hand in a way that was satisfying—or, at least, promised to be. He liked the way the cock filled out his hand, how his fingers wrapped around it to accommodate its thickness. It was easy to imagine other parts of him it could fill, a phantom ache in his jaw—between his legs—as he pictured how he would need to stretch himself to take it.

“What do you think?”

Well, that certainly was the question, wasn’t it? There were definitely lots and lots of thoughts happening in his head, all of them incredibly pornographic, but Crowley knew himself well enough to predict that if he tried to open his mouth and articulate any of those, he’d just end up making some kind of horrible, strangled noise instead of words.

He sank to his knees. He’d wanted to since he saw him in that robe. It felt… right, he thought, to see an angel like that and drop to your knees. S’what the humans did, so it was good enough for Crowley. Never mind the fact that he’d never once willingly knelt for any being in creation since the Fall.

Crowley slicked his fingers with a thought, dragged them down the length of Aziraphale’s cock under the robe, still a mystery kept out of sight. Aziraphale let out a breath that was half a shudder of pleasure, half a laugh of surprise.

“I take it that means you like it?”

In answer, Crowley leaned forward and rested his head against the place where Aziraphale’s leg joined his body, cheek pillowed on his thigh as he breathed in the heady smell of him. He gave Aziraphale’s cock another slow stroke, giving a twist of his fingers just beneath the head. Squeezed the angel’s hip with his other hand as he gasped. Held onto him, trying to slow the racing of his heart.

 _I almost lost him,_ he thought, feeling clingy and desperate and lucky beyond reason to be here. _They almost took him._

The full horror of that scenario, of a life spent without Aziraphale in it, was too big to contemplate. Instead, he focused on it in pieces. He might never have gotten to hold him again. Might not have ever gotten to watch him eat cake… Shit. Aziraphale almost got recalled to heaven permanently today, and without Crowley ever having gotten a chance to suck his cock first. In the moment, that felt like an unbearable tragedy. There was a balm for it, though, and one in easy reach. Something he could actually do something about, even if the rest felt too vast to touch, but this… this he could solve.

Crowley drew Aziraphale out from his robe, pressed a kiss to the underside of his cock as his slick hand slipped down to cradle his balls. Aziraphale’s hands were warm against that inch of skin at the back of his neck between the top of his collar and his hair. He swayed where he stood, moaned Crowley’s name as Crowley took the angel in his mouth down to the base. The salt-bitter taste of him bloomed sharp on his tongue, and Crowley kept his eyes tightly closed. It was enough for him to be able to feel, to taste. At least for right now, he was happy to remain in the darkness behind his eyelids and be lost to sensation.

“Oh, _Crowley,”_ Aziraphale sighed, running his hands through Crowley’s hair. “Crowley, you—oh, _goodness.”_

The angel steadied himself with a hand on top of Crowley’s head, planting his feet wider apart for better balance. It seemed that the trick he’d done with his tongue had worked as intended—ever since finding out that Aziraphale liked the feeling of his serpentine tongue, Crowley had been given plenty of opportunities to experiment. He’d never slept with anyone he could afford to be a little inhuman with, and he found that he liked that kind of creative freedom. There were limitations, of course, but he was willing to try just about anything within the constraints of Aziraphale’s boundaries if he thought it might be fun. Tonight, he was using the thin one, the one that Aziraphale had rather embarrassingly taken to calling “the tickly one.” It could do other things, too, like what it was doing at the present moment: coiling around Aziraphale’s shaft like he was a particularly sexy maypole.

“Crowley, your poor knees,” Aziraphale cooed, brushing the hair away from Crowley’s forehead. “That can’t— _ah!_ —can’t be comfortable for you…”

 _Fuck my knees,_ Crowley thought, a lot more fervor behind it than was probably warranted. _Who needs knees? Not me. Don’t even need legs, so fuck ‘em._

“You don’t—you don’t have to—” The angel sounded breathless as he touched the sides of Crowley’s face with something closer to intent. “Crowley, dear…”

Crowley pulled off with a pop and looked up at the angel’s pink, flushed face. “What’s wrong?” He asked, carefully navigating the sibilants as his tongue shifted back to normal.

“No, no. Nothing’s wrong, my dear—only… well, I _do_ have a bed now, and I wondered…”

He huffed a laugh. “You want to break it in, don’t you?”

“You’d better not break it, you wicked serpent. I’ve only just gotten it.” Aziraphale smiled, utterly shameless. “What do you think? Do you mind a change of location?”

Crowley looked down at himself. “…I think I might have too many clothes on.”

“I can help with that.”

Without any further preamble, Aziraphale sank to his knees beside Crowley, ruffled robe pooling on the floorboards around him, and placed a _scorching_ kiss on his lips. Crowley kissed back just as passionately, grateful that his tongue had finished its transformation in time. He made sure to never kiss the angel with anything other than his regular human-shaped tongue. He couldn’t see that going well. Aziraphale _knew_ about all the different variations of his tongue, of course, and he seemed to like what they could do… But it was different, wasn’t it? There was a difference between not minding the strange and demonic when it was bringing you to the brink of a toe-curling orgasm—when you don’t really have to look at it that closely—and having to put up with the strange and demonic flopping about in your mouth.

The kiss deepened, and the angel’s hands got to work, dropped to the falls of Crowley’s trousers to unbutton them with the speed of practiced hands. Aziraphale broke the kiss just long enough to flash Crowley a bastard grin that seemed to say, _‘Do try to keep up.’_ Not one to waste time, Crowley’s hands went high to mirror where his angel’s had gone low, ripping his cravat off even as he shrugged out of his overcoat and jacket. Their hands brushed against one another as they both fumbled to unbutton his waistcoat, the simple touch jolting like a current along Crowley’s skin.

When he was down to just his shirt, boots, and unbuttoned trousers, Aziraphale wrapped him up in a tight embrace beneath his arms. The next thing he knew, Crowley was being lifted up off of the ground and into the air, his feet dangling, the angel’s face pressed against his chest. He took the opportunity to toe off his boots and pull himself out of his trousers with a combination of thumbs in his waistband and spirited tactical kicking.

He felt Aziraphale laugh against his ribs, and just when he thought he was about to be put back down, Aziraphale began to move. The angel took a few wide steps to bypass the pile of discarded clothing, then spun in place with Crowley still held above him. For one wild, giddy moment, it felt almost like flying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical Note:** I was four wiki tabs deep on the history of window glazing when I realized I was spiraling into madness over one single throwaway line. Let’s just say Aziraphale’s glazer he hired is really exceptional at their craft and pioneered this specific kind of window insulation a century early. Call it divine inspiration. Aziraphale really wants to keep that upstairs bedroom warm for his serpent, okay?
> 
> Carrying on with this purposeful-ish treatment of history as ~~my binch~~ Play-Doh in my hands, I bring the news that the chocolate Crowley brings is an anachronism, too. And that, again, I’m choosing to run with it. Chocolate wasn’t really available as a solid food until another 45-ish years after this scene, and milk chocolate didn’t exist until 1875. Drinking chocolate had been a thing for a few hundred years in Europe by this point, and in the Americas for nearly six thousand. HOWEVER. If the Bastille still existed in the GO universe in 1793, Crowley could have also found a nice box of chocolates for his ~~boyfriend~~ ~~lover~~ associate in 1800. And write it off on his expense reports, because chocolate production back then (and still is now, in so many places) was fucking evil.
> 
> CHOCOLATE FACT! Cultures that produced cacao participated in a trade network that spanned massive distances across North, Central, and South America. There is evidence that the Pueblo people (whose land is occupied by the US government and the state governments of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas) were importing chocolate that was likely produced close to 2000 miles to the south.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> Shoutout to Lucia (again, [vialattea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vialattea/pseuds/vialattea) on Ao3 and [mochacoffee](https://mochacoffee.tumblr.com) on tumblr) for her incredible work on those floorplans and the 3D model. Even though the version of the bookshop that appears in this fic isn’t a 1 to 1 copy of the one appearing in the show (in part because it’s going to slowly evolve over time until it reaches its modern-day version, in part because I may decide to change some things around to suit my Needs), I still really need visuals while I write, and these resources saved my poor brain.  
> If you were curious, I have chosen to place Aziraphale’s storage room (the scene of the crime in chapters 6 & 7 👀) in the spot on the floorplan labeled “unknown room/closet”, and his bedroom/flat approximately above it on the upper level.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> More chapter?! More pornography?! More chocolate?!?! It’s happening, people, and it’s happening on **Thursday, 9/10** with a preview going up on tumblr the day before for WIP Wednesday.


	9. Held

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It wasn’t that Crowley cared if Aziraphale had taken lovers before the angel decided to make one of him. It was that—it was that he didn’t know if anyone had ever _loved him_ before. If anyone had ever shown him the tenderness and affection and attention he deserved.
> 
> Because if the only kind of love he’d ever gotten was what Crowley could show him—weak and unwanted, given in bits and pieces in secret, never enough and yet always _too much_ —or that cold cruelty that passed for love Upstairs… well, what kind of fucked up trick was that? Aziraphale deserved to feel loved, completely and without reservation, and by someone who was worth his time.
> 
>  _'Small and broken as it is… am I the only one who’s ever tried to love you like this?'_ Part of him wanted to ask. _'Am I the first you’ve ever taken to bed? Are mine the first hands that have gotten to hold you?'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Notes:** Emotionally messy sex, insecurity, and miscommunication. As always, everything is enthusiastically consenting even if they’re anxious dumbasses.  
> Brief discussion (in non-explicit terms) of Crowley having slept with humans in the past as a part of assignments he did for Hell.  
> Though the work itself isn’t implied to involve/be noncon, there’s mention of the fact that working for Hell means there’s a lack of privacy into one’s sex life.  
> Both of those last two points are light on the details except when shown in contrast to how things are now.
> 
> Specific sex acts: rimming, anal sex, a little bit of very light (specifically requested) edging and orgasm denial/delay.  
> Penises! Penises for everyone! And it’s Crowley’s turn to be the receptive party.  
> Does this count as another instance of Soft Dom Aziraphale? Idk, I just work here. But it’s very soft and he’s giving Crowley what he asks for.  
> There is mention of fisting ~~/playing with Crowley like the silly muppet he is~~ but in a joke-y way rather than as a plan of action. Princess Bride Grandpa voice: _Crowley does not get fisted at this time._

Crowley let himself be swung around only once, thank you, and it was only because he’d been taken by surprise. His arms wound around Aziraphale’s neck almost immediately, squeezing onto him in a tight hold that Crowley told himself was due to the activation of some latent snakey instinct—Picked up? Time to _wind!_ —and nothing more. By the time Aziraphale went in for the second arc, Crowley had drawn his legs in too. Purely to reduce the danger of kicking something over in the crowded bedroom, naturally. By opting to cling to the angel in a very cool, very snake-like way.

Even after Crowley’s legs were no longer flying out behind him, after all of his wayward limbs were tucked up against Aziraphale’s warm body, the angel continued to turn as he walked. He was laughing, and _fuck,_ the sound of it was like bells—better than bells, better than any mechanical expression of joy, because this was so very _alive._ Crowley couldn’t help but laugh, too, in spite of himself.

Aziraphale slowed and stopped, let Crowley settle in his arms until they were nose to nose. Crowley spared a moment’s chagrin to think about how, if an outside observer were to see them this way, the first animal they’d think of would not be likely to be a _snake,_ but rather some kind of sharp-elbowed, knobby-kneed gibbon.

Then, Aziraphale beamed at him, planted a kiss to the tip of his nose, said, “Looks like we’re here, darling,” and bloody _dropped him._

He didn’t drop him far. In fact, he tipped him almost all the way horizontal before he let go—at which point Crowley had let go, too, out of surprise—and he’d landed immediately on something soft and bouncy… But it had still been alarming enough to wrest a very undignified noise out of Crowley’s mouth as he fell.

Aziraphale untied his robe and let it hang open, then sat down on the narrow bed beside Crowley. The mattress dipped beneath him and it was partly that, partly Crowley’s ever-present need to go full limpet, that caused Crowley to rock closer to where the angel sat.

“That was exciting, mm?” Aziraphale asked, his eyes bright as he slid the robe off of his shoulders, shifting his hips to get the tail out from under his bottom.

“You are a menace,” Crowley declared, his solemn tone completely belied by the wide grin stretching across his face. “A demon-handling, handsy, demanding menace who—”

Crowley froze, realizing where his hands were. One was clenched at the collar of his shirt, about ready to pull it off over his head. The other had come up to the eyepiece of his glasses, practically on instinct, about to toss them to the side table like he did when he got undressed in his own lodgings. He hesitated, fingers hovering just at the edge of the metal, and chanced a look across at Aziraphale. The angel was frozen, too, holding his breath, watching Crowley with unexpected intensity.

“You can…” Aziraphale began, his voice soft, then cleared his throat. “You can keep them on. If… if you want.”

 _If you want._ Ever so polite, ever so mild, like it was Crowley who was making this choice for both of them. Still, it was nothing he wasn’t used to by now, even when the words landed in his already anxious stomach like ice. He pushed his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose and dropped his hand back to his side.

“Yeah. I’ll, ah. On. On is good.” Crowley tried not to look at how strained Aziraphale’s smile was in answer.

Very carefully, Crowley peeled off his shirt and tossed it over the side of the bed in the vague direction of his other clothes. He pulled his feet up onto the mattress, his ankles crossed and his arms tucked in around his knees. Thought about taking off his stockings, but remembered how scaly his feet got. Stockings on was supposed to be a sexy thing, right? Little black velvet garters he could pretend were an aesthetic decision instead of a shield.

When he looked back, he saw that Aziraphale had draped his robe over the armchair near the bed. He was smiling in earnest now, his cheeks pink… it was a good look on him.

“Look at you,” Aziraphale breathed, his eyes roaming over Crowley’s tightly coiled body. “Such a beautiful form.”

That was rich, coming from someone who—who bloody looked like Aziraphale. He watched the angel shift his hips, bringing one knee up onto the bed, his other foot still on the floor. It showed off the curves of him, the gentle swell of his belly and the plushness of his thighs.

“You look pretty fucking gorgeous yourself,” Crowley mumbled.

Aziraphale demurred, looking away even as he brought his hands to the tops of his own thighs, giving them both a good squeeze. “How do you like the bed?” He asked.

“Very comfortable,” Crowley answered, supporting his weight on his hands as he began to lean forward. Aziraphale turned and captured his mouth in a kiss, hands warm on the sides of his face as Crowley’s arse dropped right back down to the mattress.

“Good,” Aziraphale said, his voice low and rich, almost a purr. “I want you to be comfortable. You _deserve_ to be comfortable.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Crowley protested. “M’fine, really. Very durable and extremely flexible demon here.”

Aziraphale looked like he might have been about to say something, then his face shifted. “Can I touch you, Crowley? I’ve—I’ve been wanting to…”

Crowley lifted his arms, spreading them wide to show the full scope of his body, then let them flop down to his sides again. “Go ahead.”

“What would you like, my dear?” Aziraphale asked, mindful of his manners even as those plump, delicate hands of his ghosted over the head of his own cock. Like he wanted this so much he couldn’t help but touch himself.

Crowley swallowed, kept his hands flat on either side of himself on the quilt, still hesitant after all this time to be the first one to initiate, to choose a direction. “You know I’m not picky,” he said, and was surprised with himself at how normal he sounded. “‘S’all been good.”

The angel smiled, eyes flicking away before he looked back. He would have seemed almost shy, especially with the rosy flush across his cheeks and shoulders, except for the way he kept stroking himself, light and loose and teasing. “Do you… do you like to be penetrated?” He asked. “Like this, I mean. When you have a cock. We’ve both tried it the other way, I know, but I was curious…”

“Angel, are you asking to fuck me?” Crowley said it around a smirk, like that would hide the way the thought of it lit him up like dry kindling.

He let his eyes wander, obvious and languid, so that even with his sunglasses on Aziraphale would be able to see the appreciation Crowley had for his body. The angel seemed to like the attention, just like he seemed to like the attention he got when he moaned around a forkful of cake. Crowley watched Aziraphale’s fingers twist around his shaft as he let out a shuddering exhale, and found himself incapable of looking anywhere besides his cock. Such a pretty thing, too. Short but heavy beneath a thatch of darker blond hair, thick in a way that made him almost weak at the knees, ridiculous as that was, with the want to take him inside himself. The longing to take as much of him as he could and be filled.

Before he had realized what he’d done, Crowley noticed that he’d let his legs fall open—long, bony things folded in half so they could both fit on the bed—and the angel had followed the movement down with his eyes to where they framed Crowley’s own rather obvious erection.

“I think I might like that a lot,” Aziraphale said, letting his other hand cross the distance between them to caress the side of Crowley’s calf. “If that would be something you wanted from me.”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, feeling absurd as he nodded with all the grace of a bucket bobbing on a mop handle. “Yeah, let’s—that.”

Aziraphale beamed and leaned in closer, breath warm against Crowley’s cheek. “I’m afraid I’ve never done this part before, at least not to anyone else,” he admitted, pressing a kiss to his hairline as he reached between Crowley’s legs. “Do let me know how you like it best. I don’t want to cause you any discomfort.”

“I can miracle it, if you want,” Crowley offered. He did it that way sometimes when he was alone and rushing, and often when he wasn’t alone. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the foreplay, but it was more straightforward like that, and he always knew he’d be prepared enough for his liking.

He watched as Aziraphale’s brow furrowed, hand pausing close enough to Crowley’s body that he could feel the warmth of it across the scant distance. There was a note of what sounded like disappointment in his voice, however faint. “Is that… what you’d prefer? If you don’t like the feeling of fingers, we could do something else.”

“Fyeh. Yeah. Fingers are fine. Like ‘em. A lot, actually, I just... Forget it. Was being stupid.” He realized a bit too late that he’d said the wrong thing. Aziraphale was a stubborn bastard, immovable when he wanted to be, and relentless. He knelt there, not touching Crowley, not moving, and there was something steely in his gaze that told him that the current sexual encounter wouldn’t progress an inch until he’d given a better explanation than _‘forget it.’_

Crowley affected a casual smirk and shrugged. “Thought I’d give you the option to get on with it.”

 _Don’t know how long we have,_ he thought. _Wanted to make it count._

There was another thought, too, just a bit quieter, that said, _Didn’t want to make you have to wait on me._

“Get on with it?” Aziraphale repeated. “I thought that’s what we were doing?”

“S’fine. Just—” Crowley waved a hand, looking for the words that would salvage this after he made it weird. “Just didn’t know if you were in a hurry.”

“Oh, Crowley,” he said, and at long last he moved, leaning down into Crowley’s space. He still didn’t touch him, but he guided him down to the mattress all the same. “I am. I’ve been eager to get my hands on you all week. To get my _mouth_ on you. Now that I’ve got you in my bed, I fully intend to take my time.”

“Your—your mouth?” Crowley repeated, his own going a bit dry.

“Yes, I must admit I’ve been curious about analingus. You’ve always opened me up so decadently before, all those times when you’ve fucked me, I confess I—I quite wanted to try it myself.” Aziraphale’s face brightened, his smile gentle and warm. “Would that be something that you would like better? Would that be more pleasant for you?”

“Y—sure. Brilliant. You’ll get—get zero complaints from me. On that front. Nope. Very… very into any of that sort of thing.”

“Oh, good.” He watched Aziraphale’s eyes flick down to his babbling lips, and Crowley felt his stomach skip and flutter. He wondered if it would do that every time, wondered if he was doomed to be this ridiculous his whole immortal life. “Would it be alright if I kissed you again?”

In answer, Crowley reached his arms around the back of Aziraphale’s neck and drew him down to where he lay. Planted a firm, desperate kiss on Aziraphale’s lips, his own parted as he waited, _yearned_ for the taste of his tongue again. He was granted his wish almost immediately, Aziraphale gently licking at his mouth in invitation. The soft intrusion as his tongue slid inside. It had only been minutes since he’d had this, but it felt like a lifetime. Each kiss felt like it was stolen from a reality that said they shouldn’t get to have this, and Crowley was a grateful, eager thief.

Their kiss began as something tentative and exploratory, but tipped into something far more heated once Crowley wrapped his stockinged feet around Aziraphale’s waist and dragged that down to meet him, too. The angel’s body covered him, pressed him into the soft mattress in one long, warm line. Crowley’s body sang with the heady, gasping pleasure that sparked each time their cocks dragged against one another. Aziraphale’s hands crept up into Crowley’s hair, tugging at his short locks in a way that sent jolts of arousal all the way down his spine.

Crowley broke off to breathe, even though he didn’t need to, and so he could give a warning. “If you wanted to—to do more than this, we maybe should…”

His words were cut off by another kiss, closed-mouthed and smiling. “Right. Right, of course,” Aziraphale said, and crawled off of him towards the headboard. He took the layer of quilts in both hands and folded it back to reveal beige sheets, soft-looking and thankfully not tartan. “Are you cold? I noticed you left your stockings on.”

Crowley blinked, paused in his own scramble over to the head of the bed. Shook his head. “It’s—they’re sexy,” he said stupidly.

Aziraphale laughed, kissed his nose once he was in reach. “That they are,” he said, running a fingertip over the velvet ribbon. “But if you ever get cold, I have a lot of quilts.”

“Are you planning to mummify me, Aziraphale?” Crowley deadpanned.

“I might just,” the angel teased, ducking his head to nip at Crowley’s throat. When he next spoke, his words rumbled against the skin beneath his ear. “I did promise I’d keep you warm, and I hope you recognized that I meant by any means necessary.”

“There are better ways to do that.”

“Oh?” Aziraphale mused, pulling back to smirk at him. “You’d best position yourself, then.”

“Right, yeah,” Crowley breathed, sliding a bit on his stockings and the sheets as he tried to push himself closer to the headboard.

“Take as many pillows as you need,” Aziraphale said. “I have more even beyond those.”

“Of course, you do, angel.”

Crowley spared just a moment to debate whether he thought he ought to be face up or face down, and a second to consider putting one of those pillows up under his hips. _Pros: probably comfy, useful if body goes boneless, could be rutted against. Cons: would absolutely get soaked in spunk._ He grabbed one and squeezed it between his arms as he settled on his hands and knees.

“Look at you,” came Aziraphale’s voice from behind him, each word shaped so clearly by the smile Crowley knew he was wearing, even if he couldn’t see it. One of those broad hands palmed his backside, fingers digging gently into his spare flesh.

He was practically vibrating with anticipation by the time he felt the mattress dip between his legs, felt the first puff of hot breath against his skin. When that tongue first touched him, tracing a broad line up his perineum from his balls, Crowley shuddered out an exhale and felt the phantom strain in his lungs ease. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath. His body hadn’t realized it didn’t matter. It was a strange thing, this feeling. So relaxing and yet, at the same time, it was lighting his nerves on fire. Each lick soothed a little more of the tension out of his body, steady and even pressure working him over like a massage. He was still incredibly aroused, though, untouched and achingly hard, and each slick, slow slide of the angel’s tongue reminded him how much he wanted more.

His body opened for Aziraphale by degrees, the hard clench of muscle softening to welcome him in. He felt blissed out, like he was floating… and then a cry tore its way from his throat, his hips fucking against empty air as Aziraphale started to lick him faster, that clever tongue teasing his sensitive rim. Warm, strong hands held him open, stretching him deliciously wider. Little muffled moans and sighs slipped from the angel’s plush lips like Crowley was the last bit of cream Aziraphale was savoring at the tail end of a _Schaumrolle._ Crowley bit down on another high-pitched keen, feeling thoroughly, decadently devoured.

He should have expected it, should have known to anticipate the angel’s inevitable descent into bastardry, but it left him gasping nonetheless. It was almost too much, just on the right side of it, and Crowley’s stockinged feet slipped against the sheets as he tried to fuck back against Aziraphale’s face in a desperate attempt to chase that wicked tongue.

The next thing he knew, Aziraphale’s arms had wrapped around him, under his hips, and lifted him higher. Held his legs, secure and snug, in the cradle of his elbows. Kept them open and upright while his angelic tongue lapped hot and wet between them. Crowley’s arms, meanwhile, immediately rejected the notion that they should be asked to do the work of holding up his body weight, so Crowley just decided to give up on them entirely. He let himself drop down onto his elbows, mushed his face against the pillow that helpfully muffled some of the ridiculous noises his mouth saw fit to make. His hands fisted in the sheets, and Crowley expended what little willpower he had left to keep them human-shaped, to keep them from shifting into claws and rending Aziraphale’s soft new mattress into pieces. From shredding it open and leaving nothing but a ruin of downy white feathers... and wasn’t that a thought? A nest within a nest, a mess that took on the shape of his daydreams.

The angel, ever the opportunist, took advantage of the new angle and the easy access it provided to reach lower and take Crowley’s straining cock in hand. Smooth and warm, not a callus on those fingers—hands that were made to hold precious, fragile things. Old books, fine china. Fiddly buttons on a velvet waistcoat. The thin, straining skin of a ripe berry. Things that needed a gentle touch, things that would break if handled with anything less than devoted attention. Not _him,_ never him. Crowley wasn’t something fragile and precious. He’d been cast out and dashed on the rocks and still hadn’t broken, and yet. And _yet,_ here he was, feeling like he was about to shatter. Aziraphale stroked him with such care, with such delicate squeezes and twists, each timed so perfectly with the diffuse pressure he worked into Crowley’s body with the rhythm of his tongue…

Crowley had seen him do this before. No, not _this,_ never this. After nearly a year of weekly liaisons this all still felt so impossibly new. But he’d seen something that felt close. Something this precise and careful.

There had been a codex, covers a sun-bleached ruin, binding coming out, that familiar old book smell overpowered by the smell of neglect. To anyone else, anyone who didn’t have the patience of an angel built to guard and watch and wait for eternity, it would have looked unsalvageable. Not to Aziraphale. Aziraphale had seen its potential. He had used his miracles only sparingly, repairing the worst of the damage, stopping the vellum from disintegrating under his white-gloved touch, and the rest he had fixed with time and skill.

After two weeks in Aziraphale’s care, the book was unrecognizable from the condition it had been in when the angel found it. It was functional again, readable, and some other person might have stopped there—but Aziraphale saw in it not just the capacity to be _fixed,_ but the capacity for it to be _beautiful._ He wanted to bring it back to vibrancy, to life.

Each chapter started with a historiated initial, letters married to illustrations of infinitely tiny detail. Many of them had been rubbed away by the touch of careless hands. Some of the ink had discolored over time, too, made of pigments that weren’t built to endure forever. It was during this stage of the repair that Crowley had come into the shop for the second time, and the memory burned again in his fevered imagination. A silver-blonde head bent low over the page, his eyes fixed and focused. A strong, careful hand tracing over each complicated curve of the faded _initium,_ the brush he held dipped in ink that had been blessed to last as long as Aziraphale’s desire to keep the book in his possession—eternity, with any luck. Pale pages spread open and immobile, held steady to let the artist work.

Crowley tried to buck his hips—forward into the gentle grip of Aziraphale’s fist, backward against the tender ministrations of his tongue, _anywhere_ but where he was, strung in the balance between the two. But he couldn’t, not with any real range of motion. His lower body was completely encircled, _embraced,_ in the perfect, maddening position Aziraphale had found for them. He writhed anyway, and in response, that hand on his cock _squeezed._ His belly clenched tighter, squirmed with pooling, swirling heat as the angel picked up the pace.

“I’m—I won’t—” Crowley panted. “Not gonna last.”

Aziraphale paused just long enough to respond, his breath coming in a hot exhale against the spit-soaked, sensitive skin of Crowley’s perineum. Crowley shivered at how wonderfully filthy that made him feel.

“Do you want to?”

It wasn’t like an orgasm had to end things, he reasoned. Crowley didn’t have a refractory period. He’d banished that along with his gag reflex back during that first boring century after the Garden when he’d had little to do besides wait for there to be enough humans on Earth to be worth tempting. His options had been heading back to Hell or devising distractions on his own to occupy his time, so he’d found himself a nice cave and worked out the exact limitations of what his new person-shaped body could do.

The idea of coming right at this moment, pinned and helpless under Aziraphale’s clever hands, was extremely appealing. So too, he had to admit, was the thought of being made to wait as long as Aziraphale wanted him to, kept in agonizing tension until he couldn’t take it any longer. He’d experimented with those options on his own, knew he liked both indulgence and denial. Crowley had a suspicion that Aziraphale might be able to push him a great deal further—in either direction—than anything he was capable of doing alone. He wanted everything, _anything,_ just so long as it was Aziraphale who was with him. The problem, of course, was in the act of choosing.

He felt that swirling tide of pleasure in his belly tighten, felt the muscles in his stomach and thighs tense in anticipation of release. In that one strained moment, Crowley made up his mind. The thought of ending this now felt unbearable, and even though his rational mind knew that their bodies weren’t obstacles, that they could keep this going as long as they wanted to, his rational mind was nowhere to be found. Nothing lasted, nothing was guaranteed. What if he finished and then… then this was it? What if he’d never get this again? The future was uncertain but now… _now_ was everything. All he knew was that he didn’t want this to stop, that he wanted to make this last as long as he possibly could.

“No—not. Not yet,” Crowley gasped, shaking his head hard where it hung between his shoulders.

As soon as he’d given the word, Aziraphale’s hands shifted. A finger and a thumb circled the base of his cock and squeezed him tight, stalling the inevitable. The pressure felt impossible to bear as it rose higher and higher with nowhere to go until, with no way to crest, it began to wane.

Aziraphale’s other hand was between his shoulder blades, scratching Crowley’s back with those blunt nails in slow, methodical strokes. It felt good, luxurious but grounding. Pleasurable, but without demand.

“Alright?” The angel asked, his voice coming from somewhere above him now. He must have sat upright.

Crowley tried to speak but found that he was breathing harder than he’d realized, each ragged breath coming like he had just run all night long without rest. Like he’d surfaced after drowning. Instead, he nodded again and gave a halfhearted laugh and thumbs up. Aziraphale released his still incredibly hard cock and brought his other hand up to scratch his spine, working gentle arcs and indecipherable patterns into his overheated skin.

“Would you like a break?”

That was the opposite of what he’d like, actually, and he communicated that fact with a rather breathless and rushed, _“D’youstillwannafuckme?”_

Aziraphale’s hands paused. “Pardon?”

“Do you,” Crowley tried again, “still want to fuck me. ‘Cause you can. If you’d like. Think I’d… think I’d like that.”

The angel listened to him until his babbling petered out, idly massaging his lower back just above his still airborne bum. “Are you ready for that? It can sting a bit if you aren’t adequately prepared, or if you aren’t relaxed…”

Crowley huffed out a laugh, peering over his shoulder at the worried look on Aziraphale’s face. “I know,” he said. “But I am ready. Promise. I am the very picture of prepared and relaxed.”

“If you’re sure…”

“Angel,” he drawled, shifting his legs to lay down flat on the bed. “You could stick your entire arm up me at this point.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale chided.

“Both arms,” he continued, wriggling in such a way that both scooched his backside more into Aziraphale’s space and also pressed his cock against the mattress. “Up to the shoulder.”

_“Crowley!”_

“March a whole battalion up there…”

“Of all the vulgar things,” Aziraphale said, doing his level best to sound scandalized and unamused, yet failing utterly in both goals. “I should smack your bottom for that, you…” A snort. “…you miscreant.”

“That,” Crowley said, wriggling said bottom all the way up into Aziraphale’s lap, “is not the discouragement you seem to think it is.”

He squawked out a laugh when Aziraphale pinched his backside instead, then bit his lip. Crowley resolved to never, not even under promises of sexual favors or threat of torture, let the angel know he was ticklish.

“You know… There’s something novel about this, I think,” Aziraphale mused. His hand was warm on Crowley’s hip, thumb rubbing circles into his rather bony bum.

“First time getting to test out your opinion of buggery?” Crowley asked, then realized how much that sounded like a leading question. “With me, I mean.”

They hadn’t discussed that bit yet, not in all this time. Aziraphale had told him several times that he was relatively inexperienced with one thing or another, but he’d never explicitly said that Crowley was the only partner he’d ever had. Crowley had never asked, and had certainly never brought up his own history. It wasn’t really something he wanted to talk about. For either of them. What Aziraphale did wasn’t any of Crowley’s business, and what Crowley did was… well, it wasn’t his own business, either, was it? Just one of the many perks of being an agent of Hell. No such thing as privacy, not when you have all these expectations and orders and quotas to deal with.

He realized Aziraphale hadn’t answered yet, and was in fact leaning away. Crowley twisted at the waist, lifted himself up on an elbow, trying to get a better view of what was happening behind him. The angel was reaching for the table beside the bed, humming something quiet and bouncy under his breath as he hunted around in the drawer. Aziraphale seemed distracted but not evasive, despite what the prickling feeling in Crowley’s skin told him. It was probably nothing at all. People paused all the time. It didn’t have to _mean_ something. If Aziraphale was annoyed at him for prying, for acting like—like they had something more than they did, he’d say something, wouldn’t he? He had in the past.

Crowley swallowed around nothing, around the burning curiosity rising up in his throat like bile. It wasn’t so much that he cared what Aziraphale’s answer might be. It was just… it was just that there was a _question._ They’d known each other for nearly six thousand years, been friends practically since the very Beginning of everything, best friends for at least the last few centuries… and yet there was still so much Crowley didn’t know about Aziraphale. He wanted to know absolutely everything about him.

There had been hundreds and hundreds of years in their past where they didn’t cross paths even once, and Crowley didn’t know what Aziraphale did back then to pass the time. Before they invented books, what did he do in the evenings? What was the first thing he ever ate that made him decide he liked it? What did he think when he saw the ocean for the first time? Aziraphale had nearly been taken up to Heaven this morning, and if he’d gone, Crowley would have never, _never_ gotten to find out even one of those answers. There would have been a void left in his life in the angel’s wake, an absence like a missing tooth in his mouth that his tongue would always seek out.

It wasn’t that Crowley cared if Aziraphale had taken lovers before the angel decided to make one of him. It was that—it was that he didn’t know if anyone had ever _loved him_ before. If anyone had ever shown him the tenderness and affection and attention he deserved.

Because if the only kind of love he’d ever gotten was what Crowley could show him—weak and unwanted, given in bits and pieces in secret, never enough and yet always _too much_ —or that cold cruelty that passed for love Upstairs… well, what kind of fucked up trick was that? Aziraphale deserved to feel loved, completely and without reservation, and by someone who was worth his time.

 _Small and broken as it is… am I the only one who’s ever tried to love you like this?_ Part of him wanted to ask, _Am I the first you’ve ever taken to bed? Are mine the first hands that have gotten to hold you?_

He didn't ask. It didn't matter. He swallowed it down. There was no way to ask those questions that wouldn’t come across as an insult. An overreach. Aziraphale didn't belong to him. What the angel did was his own business, and his alone.

Though… Aziraphale _was_ the first for Crowley, in a way. Not the first he’d ever fucked, no. He was far from the first Crowley had taken bed, and many more hands before the angel's had touched him. And yet. _And yet,_ Aziraphale was the first being he'd slept with outside of Hell's urging. Yes, most of those others had been people Crowley selected himself. There were times he found himself needing to pad out a report and it was far easier sometimes to look for a pretty face in a tavern and check off “lust” on a form afterwards than it was to spend his time setting up some scheme. No one got hurt, and it was usually fun for everyone involved... but there was always, in the back of his mind, the knowledge that he was doing what Hell expected of him. What they would punish him if he failed to do.

With Aziraphale, though, it was entirely of their own choosing. Hell didn't ask for this—Hell didn't, _couldn't_ know about it. It was just the pair of them, as they had for thousands of years now, doing something unexpected in secret because it was what they _wanted_ to do. Not their sides. _Them._

It was a heady thing, sometimes. Free will. Neither of them was supposed to have had it, and yet...

Crowley thought, then, of Eve. He thought of the way she had been offered the answers to questions she hadn’t yet known how to ask. She’d had comfort in their Garden, yes, and safety too. Those first two humans had a really fucking good thing going for them, if the view Crowley had gotten from up in the branches of that tree had been an accurate assessment.

There was another question Crowley wanted to ask, so much more important than the others. So much more important than the past, either of their pasts, and any being who may have come before.

 _Will I be the last?_ He wanted to ask. _Will I be the last to be invited into your bed? Will you tire of me, and seek out another's hands instead?_

He did not ask this, of course. He scolded himself for thinking it, for not being able to stop thinking it. In the end, it mattered no more than any other question he could ask.

In his experience, you shouldn’t ask questions when you have a good thing going. That way lies ruin.

“Here we are,” Aziraphale said, voice bright. He turned back around, a bottle of oil in hand. When he saw Crowley’s expression, he frowned. Swallowed. “Crowley, dear, are you alright? If you’re having second thoughts…”

“Nope. No second thoughts at all,” Crowley answered quickly, smiling. “Fully onboard.”

He tamped down the chilly fear that told him that while Aziraphale had been permitted to stay on Earth today, that was less a victory and more of a delay. That the loss of him was inevitable. That no matter how long he spent getting to know Aziraphale, there would always be more to learn, and that no matter how many millennia more they got to share, it would never be enough.

…If it was truly inevitable, though, what was the use squandering the time they _did_ have with worries and fear? He was here now. He was _wanted_ now. At least for the moment, they were as close to safe as they could ever be.

“C’mere,” Crowley murmured, twisting more than a human spine should have allowed.

He held his arms open and Aziraphale sank into them, warm and soft and grounding where he lay over Crowley’s hip. His erection pressed into the back of one of Crowley’s thighs, so hard he was probably aching with it by now—Crowley definitely was, his own cock twitching where it was trapped against the mattress. He shivered at the heat of the contact, but for just a moment, all they did was hold each other. Hold each other, and breathe.

Aziraphale kissed him, his lips sweet and bitter and rich.

“You’ve been at the chocolates, haven’t you?” Crowley observed, and his heart strained to accommodate the rush of affection that flowed into it at the feeling of Aziraphale laughing within the circle of his arms.

“You caught me,” Aziraphale whispered, swiping a thumb over his lips as he smiled. “I snagged one for you, too. Open up.”

He held his mouth obligingly open, and he forgot to check—forgot to care—if the tongue that brushed against Aziraphale’s fingers was forked or rounded. There was salt on his angel’s skin, and he permitted himself the decadence of closing his lips around them as Aziraphale fed him. The taste of chocolate bloomed in his mouth and he let it chase away the sour tang of fear that had no place lingering here, not right now.

There was such warmth in Aziraphale’s expression that Crowley himself felt like he could melt from it, melt like the last bite of chocolate on his teeth.

“I’m opening my shop,” Aziraphale said, wonder in his voice, “On Friday. That’s why you brought these over. We’re… we’re celebrating.”

“Cheers,” Crowley said back, and with nothing to use to toast, he kissed the tip of the angel’s nose.

Aziraphale squeezed him tighter where his arms were wrapped around Crowley’s waist, still talking like he was in awe. “I have a bookshop. And a flat above it. A bedroom. A _bed.”_ He shifted where he lay, pressing his cock harder into Crowley’s body. Looked at him with half-lidded eyes the color of a storm at sea, something hot and intent creeping into his tone that set Crowley on fire to hear it. “I have a bed, and I’m going to get to fuck you in it. In _my_ home. In _my_ bed.”

“Well,” Crowley said, his voice oddly hoarse. “Get on with it then.”

Crowley dropped his face back down to the pillow, limbs spilling out across the top of Aziraphale’s dreadfully soft mattress, spreading his knees wider as he heard the angel uncork the bottle and slick himself. His hips gave a halfhearted stutter when the angel’s thumb slid over his entrance, working the warm oil into tender skin and loose muscle with such focus and care Crowley had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from blurting out the kind of things his soppy little heart was telling him to say.

 _I’m yours, too,_ it insisted. _In every way. In any way you’d want me._

The angel lifted Crowley up by his hips until he could rest his weight on his knees, pressing little kisses up the line of his spine as he did. By the time he felt the blunt nudge of the head of Aziraphale’s cock against him, lining himself up as he held Crowley open with his other hand, Crowley felt about ready to vibrate apart from anticipation.

Then came the heat, the feeling of being stretched to fit something hot and hard and blissful. Of being filled. There was no pain, no sting when Aziraphale sank home with one slow, even push. It was the most welcome intrusion as the angel slid inside his body in an ecstasy of degrees, of patient inches and self-control. He waited, too, once he had bottomed out. Waited, unmoving, while Crowley trembled beneath him. As he was overwhelmed by the pleasure of taking that beautiful, thick cock all the way down to the root.

A breathless, giddy laugh slipped from Crowley’s lips as he realized something. God Herself could appear in a pillar of light, right here in the bedroom above the bookshop, and tell him She’d made a mistake. Offer to take him back up to the stars, away from the stench and chill of Hell to bask in the heat and chaotic beauty of a stellar nursery for the rest of his days. The rest of eternity. Crowley knew with a blasphemous sort of clarity that he would tell Her no without a thought. There was no place in any reality he’d rather be than right here, just as he was.

Aziraphale’s arms were the closest thing he’d ever felt to a home.

The angel stroked the stretched-out rim of his arsehole with a fingertip, featherlight and teasing. Crowley squirmed under his touch, pressed himself backwards as much as he could when already feeling practically speared open already.

“You look... incredible like this,” Aziraphale said, saying each word like he was straining to keep his voice steady. “Taking my—my cock like this. You feel so hot and soft around me, and it’s like—like I can feel you everywhere.”

“You can—you can move,” Crowley told him, then, for good measure, added, “Please move.”

Aziraphale obeyed, dragging himself back with the speed and inevitability of a glacier until Crowley feared he was going to pull out completely. He paused for only a moment, letting the head of his cock tug at Crowley’s sensitive rim, then pushed back in every bit as deep and slow as he had on that first incredible thrust. The pace he built to was methodical and intense, predictable and steady but no less thrilling for it. His world narrowed down to only the feeling of warm hands on his skin and the hypnotic pulse between his legs.

Was there a sexy way, Crowley wondered, to tell your lover he fucked like a soldier marching on patrol? Probably not, especially if that lover was Aziraphale. It would probably make him feel self-conscious, and nothing could kill an erection where it stood like thoughts of Heaven’s marching orders. Besides, Crowley didn’t want him to think he was complaining—it felt bloody good! The most thorough seeing-to of his eternal life, actually. Crowley kept his commentary brief, enthusiastic, and mostly monosyllabic, with the occasional ragged _“angel”_ thrown in for variety.

As the tempo shifted, bled from maddening _larghetto_ into relentless _adagio,_ built into an _andante_ he knew he’d dream about for a century, Crowley realized he’d been wrong. This couldn’t be compared to something as rote as a march. He felt like he was being subsumed by the ocean itself, pleasure washing over him like the ebb and flow of the tide. Each push and pull was backed by enough pressure to make his eyes want to cross, never enough to hurt but enough that he couldn’t forget for even a second that he was getting fucked, fucked, _fucked_ into a mattress nearly as soft as the angel on top of him.

Aziraphale’s hands wandered, petting and stroking and squeezing everywhere like he wanted to touch every part of Crowley all at once. They grasped at his shoulder blades, his ribs, his hips, holding firm for a few thrusts before moving somewhere else. His fingers stroked the back of Crowley’s neck and through his hair. Thumbs rubbed circles into his lower back where his scales erupted, pressed into the back of his shaking thighs.

“Let me hold you,” Aziraphale asked him, and Crowley babbled out some response to tell him yes, _yes,_ please, he wanted that.

_More than anything, else he wanted that._

He felt the angel pull all the way out of him, felt hollow in his absence. Then those arms, warm and soft, squeezed around his chest and lifted his face up away from the pillow, straightened his spine until he was kneeling upright. They both were—he felt the dip of the mattress between his legs where Aziraphale knelt between them, felt where he was pressed up close behind him, an unbroken line of contact from cheek to hip.

“You feel so good in my arms, Crowley,” Aziraphale murmured into his ear, holding him in a grip of steel and lowering him back down onto his cock.

“Fuck— _fuck,_ s’good, keep—keep doing…” Crowley panted. Aziraphale pressed open-mouthed kisses into his jaw as he thrust upward into him, and Crowley twisted his neck to meet those kisses with his own lips, awkward angle be damned.

With almost all of his weight supported by the angel, Crowley found he couldn’t fuck himself back down on Aziraphale's cock. He felt suspended, pinned in place, his legs spread too wide to help him find much purchase. The headboard was close, though, and he reached out for it with both hands, knuckles white where he grasped the carved wood. It was enough to give him the leverage he needed, and he thrilled to hear the gasps and huffs Aziraphale made as Crowley pushed back down to meet him thrust for thrust.

“You are…” Aziraphale said, between kisses. “So very clever.”

Aziraphale shifted his hold, relying on Crowley's strength to keep them upright. He kept the two of them pressed together with one arm snug across Crowley's chest, and let the other wander lower. His palm was soft and slick against Crowley's straining cock, fingers tightening into a fist just beneath the head of it. Crowley's hips jerked as he worked himself up and down, pleasure spiking through him at the peak of each direction. He was breathing too hard to kiss properly now, so Aziraphale kissed his cheek, the corner of his mouth... wherever he could reach.

“Angel, I—I— _fuck!”_

“I have you, darling," Aziraphale said to him, his own hips slipping out of rhythm. “Want to—want to feel what it's like for you to... to come with me inside you.”

How could he hear that and do anything but spill over the angel's fist, muscles seizing and clenching around his cock, throat choking around the sweet sound of his name...

Crowley collapsed forward against the headboard onto his elbows, felt the angel hesitate and start to pull out.

“No, no,” he corrected, breathless. “You can—you can—want you to, to stay.”

Aziraphale kissed the back of his neck, hands dragging up his sides to rest on his shoulders, and began to fuck Crowley up against the wall. He was wonderfully sensitive, felt wonderfully used, and let himself go totally boneless. With his head swimming in post coital bliss, his skin tingling from the crest of his orgasm, Crowley spared a thought to be happy that Aziraphale had no close neighbors who might hear the knocking of the headboard against the wainscoting and become suspicious of the unmarried Mr. Fell's nighttime proclivities.

 _I love you,_ Crowley thought with sudden, piercing clarity. He knew he hadn't said it out loud because he'd put his mouth around his own forearm when he felt the sentimentality creeping up on him. _You deserve to know much you matter. You deserve to live each day feeling important._

Aziraphale's hands gripped Crowley's short hair in such a way that those bright, sharp twinges of pain sang in harmony with the low hum of his afterglow. Crowley rolled his spine, arching his back into the feeling, and that was apparently all it took. Wet heat bloomed in his body as the angel came inside him with a half-stifled shout.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. This is the first chapter in a real long time where I haven’t had a big chonky endnote. I feel… weird, not having anything vaguely educational here. Uhhhh…  
>  **Completely Unrelated Fact:** [Did you know a shrimp’s heart is located in its head? ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKODxssV9vA) 🦐 💓 ⤵ 🤯
> 
> Next chapter goes up **next Thursday, 9/17** with a preview the day before on Tumblr for WIP Wednesday.


	10. Panopticon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale took a long, shuddering breath, and then said it all in a rush. “Would it be better for you if I was bad at being an angel?”
> 
> If Crowley were more practiced at blinking, he probably would have done it on instinct just then. “Better for me… how?”
> 
> “Would it be… easier for you, as a demon, to do your job if you were paired off against an angel who was… weak? Easily swayed?”
> 
> “Maybe,” Crowley said, shrugging. He felt Aziraphale shrink back against the headboard by a degree. “Dunno. I’ve never tried it.”
> 
> Aziraphale tilted his head to look at him. “What do you mean?”
> 
> Crowley stretched, then slid out of Aziraphale’s hold to sit beside him on the edge of the bed, extending a hand to steady the chocolate box as it transferred from his own lap into Aziraphale’s. The loss of contact and warmth that came with the change in position wasn’t very appealing, but Crowley wanted to look at the angel straight on.
> 
> “I mean I’ve never tried being paired off against a weak angel.” Crowley nudged him with one of the bony knees still bundled up in Aziraphale’s space. “Only ever been paired off against you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there! This chapter is kind of a downer, just as a heads up. It’s also soft and humorous in places, but overall, it’s a chapter about these two doing their best and loving each other in the depths of a very shitty situation without any exit in sight. The chapter doesn’t end in a particularly soft spot, but does end with hope, and the idea they want to keep taking care of each other. If you need to wait to read, I totally understand.
> 
> **Content Notes:**  
>  A metric fuckton of anxiety and self-doubt.  
> Themes of being watched/monitored/controlled.  
> In general, Heaven and Hell being just… real shitty, y’all. Most of the focus is on Heaven’s psychological abuse, but there’s quick mention of Hell’s physical abuse too.  
> Mention of off-page drinking to excess to avoid thinkin’ about your troubles.  
> Background incidental character death.  
> Potentially dysphoria-like content, specifically about someone having a vulva when they’d rather not.
> 
> Again, just like in ch. 7, it’s not _about_ dysphoria, but it got me feeling a bit strange in my own genderweird feelings, so it gets a CW. Heads up, this topic is pretty heavily entwined with the topic of monitoring/control and psychological abuse.   
> I’m going to stick another extended warning in the end note for this one with context spoilers if you want to know what’s up before you decide if you want to read, and if you need more information than that, please contact me and ask and I’ll be happy to provide more info.

> 
>   
> Specific sex acts: none.   
> Everyone still has the penises they began the night with, but there’s kind of heavy content about stuff that happened previously when Aziraphale had a vulva (see: Content Note/Context Spoiler). There is discussion of past/potential sex, and there is leftover sex mess/fluids, but the only thing getting fucked here is my heart.

He felt the slide of sweat between Aziraphale’s belly and his lower back as the angel shifted behind him, his softening cock slipping free of Crowley’s body. Crowley didn’t let him get very far away, laying down beside him and scooting his wonderfully sore arse backwards into the warmth of his embrace. Aziraphale accepted the intrusion easily, tossing a heavy arm over Crowley’s shoulder and pressing them even closer together on the narrow mattress.

“It looks like we’ve made quite the mess,” Aziraphale chuckled, his breath ruffling the hair at the back of Crowley’s neck. “Would you like a hand getting cleaned up?”

Crowley grunted his assent into the pillow. Aziraphale was right. There was come slipping out of him, dripping down his thighs and mingling with the sweat and oil. It probably would become uncomfortable before too much longer, though if Aziraphale hadn’t made the offer Crowley doubted he would have mustered the effort to do anything about it. He closed his heavy eyelids at the ripple of Aziraphale’s miracle, waited for the tingle of his power against his skin, but it never came.

Aziraphale peeled himself away from Crowley, prodding him in the hip with something warm and wet. He caught himself before he could whine about the loss of contact.

“Come on then, flip over, you silly serpent,” Aziraphale murmured, amused, as his hands helped Crowley’s useless, boneless body roll onto his back.

He grimaced at the way the sheets stuck to him as he was turned—the spend on his stomach was already going cold and tacky in the hair on his belly and between his legs. Very flattering.

Aziraphale must have noticed because he poked Crowley again and said, “Don’t worry about the sheets, I can get those later.”

“Did you miracle a cloth?” Crowley asked, proud of himself for making the words go. Aziraphale nodded as he set to work cleaning up Crowley’s front, gently moving his flaccid cock out of the way to dab at the skin beneath it.

He wanted to ask why, wanted to tease Aziraphale for his half-measure. It would have been easier and more efficient to banish the mess all in one go, and would have used the same amount of power as it had to summon a wet flannel. It wouldn’t have left Aziraphale in the awkward position of having to wipe away the evidence the human way… but Crowley realized before he spoke that he didn’t feel like complaining about the way Aziraphale was touching him. He’d never complain about that, especially not like this. The matter-of-fact way the angel lifted his knees to swipe up the oil on the backs of his thighs. The careful way he moved the cloth over Crowley’s stretched and tender entrance, not a sexual touch but one that was still so intimate that he found himself aching with it.

“There we are,” Aziraphale declared with a flourish of the cloth. He gave himself a perfunctory clean-up and then banished the rag. “Good as new.”

“Ridiculous,” Crowley muttered, letting his head drop back down to the pillow. As Aziraphale settled in beside him, he changed his mind and decided to risk it, turning over on his side to put his face against the angel’s chest.

“As comfortable as this is, the bed _is_ awfully small, and I thought, perhaps…” Aziraphale began. Crowley stiffened, prepared to back away, but the angel put a hand on his shoulder. He shifted around, held his arms open like there was an empty spot waiting there for Crowley. “Only if you’d like, of course.”

Ears burning hotter than anyone who’d just been _that_ thoroughly fucked should expect to feel, Crowley crawled over Aziraphale’s body and draped himself up the length of him like the angel was his own personal _chaise longue._ Aziraphale parted his legs further still to make room for him, then tugged the quilts up over them both. A warm little cocoon for two.

“Yes, that’s it exactly,” Aziraphale said, humming softly as he stretched to reach the box of chocolates on the side table. He wrapped his arms around Crowley’s shoulders, settled the box onto his lap. Pressed a kiss into his hair.

“You’ve made me into a table,” Crowley grumbled, entirely without heat.

“Well, you’re so good at it,” the angel countered.

He settled his hands on either side of the box, pressing gentle weight into Crowley’s hips. Crowley shimmied up into the touch and reached for one of the chocolates.

“With the way Downstairs talks sometimes, they’d probably agree I’d make a better table than I do a demon.”

Aziraphale plucked the chocolate right out of Crowley’s fingers. “I’m not sure. I just got a very comprehensive demonstration of your wicked wiles.”

Crowley turned at the waist so the angelic chocolate thief sitting behind him could get a good look at his very indignant and shocked expression. “Wiles that were subsequently thwarted. Vigorously. Thwarted right into the mattress, I was. Be walking funny all day tomorrow after a thwarting like that.”

“You’re always walking funny. I’m not sure anyone will notice.”

“You are insufferable, you know that?”

“And yet, here you are.” Aziraphale reached for another chocolate, this time bringing it to Crowley’s lips. “Suffering. Willingly.”

In lieu of an answer, Crowley opened his mouth and accepted the bite. There wasn’t really a way to contest that while still maintaining what little dignity he had left, and besides, it was true. He scooched backwards, pressing himself closer into the heat between Aziraphale’s soft thighs and let his head rest on the angel’s shoulder.

“It wasn’t… too much, was it?” He heard Aziraphale say. Felt the vibration of his words right through his own chest. “I know I tease, but… I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“Nah,” Crowley said, easy and relaxed. By now, he was used to reassuring Aziraphale when he got worried about him like this. He wasn’t yet used to being worried about, though, and he wasn’t sure he ever would be. “You couldn’t.”

There was a pause. Aziraphale reached for another chocolate, his lips brushing Crowley’s hair as he leaned forward. His breath huffed, hot on the back of Crowley’s neck. Finally, he spoke up. “Why do you say that?”

“Mmm?”

“You’ve said it before, that you… you don’t see any risk of harm from me. That you don’t think it’s possible for me to hurt you. Why is that?”

The real answer was, _“because I trust you,”_ but between the two of them, simple truths were rarely that simple to say. It was easier to filter it out between his teeth, to strain out the depth and meaning and mask it all behind the familiar language of work and sides. He’d trusted Aziraphale for such a long time, but it was easier to look at it as trust that had fangs—at his own throat, yes, and locked around the angel’s. Trust built, at least to start, on the idea that they couldn’t destroy each other without also destroying themselves. They both took risk to do this, to do any of this, and Crowley could pretend that the only reason he didn’t expect betrayal was because Aziraphale was as doomed as he was if they were ever caught.

So, instead, Crowley said, “Well. You’ve never done it before.”

Aziraphale hummed, seeming to consider the point. “I don’t know if that’s quite accurate to say. We’ve known one another quite a long time, after all.” His hands reached up and settled on Crowley’s shoulders, heavy and warm and strong as he rubbed circles into the muscles between shoulder and neck. What traces of soreness or tension still lingered in Crowley’s body began to make a speedy exit. “But what I want to know is… is it that you think you can’t be hurt, or that I am incapable of hurting?”

Crowley cocked his head, stretching into the massage he was receiving. “Both, I think? I mean, yes. This body can feel pain. Had that confirmed for me quite thoroughly a few times. But short of discorporation, there’s not a lot I couldn’t shrug off. I’m a lot stronger than a human.”

“So am I,” the angel said, his voice mild.

_Understatement of the century, that._

“Still a demon, though. Still awfully durable. Unless you’re planning to swap out your lube for Holy Water next time and melt me where I lay, not much is permanent for me.”

“I’d never!” Aziraphale gasped. He sounded horrified. Disgusted, even. Crowley had to laugh.

“Exactly. And that’s point two. _You’d never.”_

“Would never, or could never?”

“Well, I mean physically, I’m sure you could do a lot of things. Anything, theoretically. But I’ve never seen you be cruel on purpose. I’m not sure you could be.”

“Of course, I couldn’t,” Aziraphale said as if on reflex. “I’m an angel.”

“Agree to disagree on that reasoning. Chocolate?” Crowley held one up to offer, and when Aziraphale took it, he popped another one into his own mouth. He had to admit, he’d selected a box of _very_ tasty treats for their post-shag snacks—though if the wiggling and the yummy noises kept happening behind him like they were whenever Aziraphale ate one, they might become snacks for intermission instead.

“But of course, that’s also part of the point,” Aziraphale said later, once he’d finished being needlessly, marvelously salacious right in Crowley’s ear. “I _am_ an angel, and I’m… well, I’m built a certain way. For certain tasks.”

“Mmm. Soldiering, I suppose. And guarding things. Like your expansive hoard of tomes downstairs. And your _not suited for public browsing_ stacks up here.” A moan of his own escaped Crowley’s throat as Aziraphale’s thumbs worked out a knot in his muscles he hadn’t noticed was there. “I don’t think there’s any way I could fail to notice the way you’re able to sling me around like a demonic ragdoll. Like today when you threw me up against your back door.”

“Well.” Aziraphale huffed. “Our meeting had to be postponed this morning. I had all day to think about what I wanted to do once I got you alone. I didn’t see the point in delaying.”

Crowley swiveled where he sat to get a better look at that bastard angel behind him. He could hear it a thousand times—might even get to, if he played his cards right, and wasn’t that a fucking miracle—and he’d never get used to the blunt way Aziraphale flirted with him sometimes.

“Really now,” he croaked.

Aziraphale’s face brightened. “And I suppose I was celebrating, too.”

“Celebrating?”

“Yes! I wanted to celebrate—” Aziraphale stopped himself, his lips shutting around whatever he had been about to say. Soon after, the smile was back, just a touch less bright than before. “Did you hear I've been given a medal?”

Crowley’s eyebrows crept up. “Is that right? I suppose congratulations are in order. What was it for?”

Aziraphale began to speak, then stalled out. “You know, I… he didn’t specifically say. Just that I’d—that I’d been here a while. Six thousand years, almost. Could have been all of it. Could have been anything, really.”

“Oh, well, in that case…” Crowley said, bringing another chocolate up to Aziraphale’s lips. He waited until it was in the angel’s mouth to keep talking. “I wonder if it was one of yours or one of mine that tipped you over.”

The angel sputtered around the chocolate, his eyes going a bit wide. He covered his mouth with his hand and swallowed hard. “That,” he said at last. “Isn’t funny.”

“I thought it was.”

“It’s not, it’s—it’s dangerous, you talking like that.”

Crowley looked down at the quilt, barely covering their lower halves which were still very naked and very pressed together. “Yes. It would be pretty dangerous if anyone heard me say that right now.” He took a long, deep sigh, a smile around its edges, and rested the side of his face against Aziraphale’s chest. “Congratulations, though. I mean that. It’s past time your head office recognized you for what you do.”

Aziraphale was quiet for a long time, not even moving to take a bite of chocolate. Crowley was beginning to get concerned, but then he spoke up again. A bit too loud, a bit too stiff, but it was better than silence. “A question occurs to me, Crowley. One that I’m… not sure I should ask.”

Curiosity, powerful and nagging, flared up in him. “Ask away. Ask me anything you like.”

_I never want you to swallow down your questions. Especially not for me._

He felt Aziraphale’s throat work, felt him breathe around the words he was trying to formulate.

“I’ve wondered before, in the past, if I am good at being an angel.”

“‘Course you are,” Crowley said easily, automatically. And then, with only the most negligible trace of sarcasm, “Like you said. You’re an angel. Dunno if it’s possible for you to be bad at being one. Good is _what you do.”_

“That wasn’t the question.” Aziraphale paused for a moment. Bit his lip. “Well, I suppose it is _a_ question. One I’ll need to grapple with for all time, I suppose. But it wasn’t the question I wanted to ask _you,_ specifically.”

“… You know, that’s fair. I’m not exactly the authority on what constitutes being a good angel. But go on. Say what you want to.”

Aziraphale took a long, shuddering breath, and then said it all in a rush. “Would it be better for you if I was bad at being an angel?”

If Crowley were more practiced at blinking, he probably would have done it on instinct just then. “Better for me… how?”

It was a heavy, heady thought, one that approached the kind of private thoughts he’d had that straddled the line between fear and fantasy. The kind that he never, _ever_ thought he’d hear Aziraphale vocalize.

“As an… as my Adversary, I suppose.”

_Ah._

“Right. Yeah. ‘Course.”

“Would it be… easier for you, as a demon, to do your job if you were paired off against an angel who was… weak? Easily swayed?”

“Maybe,” Crowley said, shrugging. He felt Aziraphale shrink back against the headboard by a degree. “Dunno. I’ve never tried it.”

Aziraphale tilted his head to look at him. “What do you mean?”

Crowley stretched, then slid out of Aziraphale’s hold to sit beside him on the edge of the bed, extending a hand to steady the chocolate box as it transferred from his own lap into Aziraphale’s. The loss of contact and warmth that came with the change in position wasn’t very appealing, but Crowley wanted to look at the angel straight on.

“I mean I’ve never tried being paired off against a weak angel.” Crowley nudged him with one of the bony knees still bundled up in Aziraphale’s space. “Only ever been paired off against you.”

“Oh.”

“I am _excellent_ at my job, Aziraphale. My tactics are better than any of the methods Downstairs is trying to push. I get results. I tempt. I corrupt. I get souls in our ledgers.” With each statement, he tapped the top of the quilt with his hand for emphasis. “And for the last eight hundred years, just about, you and I have had an Arrangement. One that only works because you and I are evenly matched. Balanced. You see my wiles, you thwart them, and the world keeps on turning.”

“Right,” Aziraphale said. “I… I suppose that’s. Yes. It—it does work, doesn’t it?”

He smiled, flickering and unsteady, but it was a smile. There were crinkles around his eyes as he looked over at Crowley, as he snatched up another chocolate to eat like it was a pleasant secret. Crowley let himself relax, just by a fraction. Leaned up against the pillows. Tucked his stockinged feet up under Aziraphale’s leg.

While Crowley was relaxing, however, Aziraphale seemed to be winding himself up, his fingers gripping and releasing the quilt as he settled himself up against the headboard. He straightened his shoulders and gave a quick little huff of an exhale, then turned to look at Crowley with what he recognized as a purposely neutral expression on his face. There was a chocolate in Crowley’s hand that had been on its way to his mouth, but the sudden seriousness of how the angel was acting gave him pause.

“Can we talk about what happened this morning?” Aziraphale asked, and _oh,_ that carefully restrained tension was contagious.

“Which part?” Crowley asked in return, casually setting the chocolate back in the box.

“I know you… I saw you outside the bookshop. When I was with the Archangels.” Aziraphale folded his hands in his lap and kept them still. From the way he hovered one hand over the fingers of his other, Crowley could tell he was probably trying not to fidget with his ring even though he wanted to. “I know you heard, ah. Some of the things that were said.”

Crowley wasn’t sure where the angel was wanting to take this conversation. Maybe all he wanted was confirmation that Crowley hadn’t overheard any confidential information, which was something he could honestly provide. The only thing he’d heard had been enough—that Heaven wanted to take Aziraphale out of his bookshop and replace him with Michael, of all the great feathery arseholes they kept on payroll up there.

“Might have done, yeah.”

“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” Aziraphale said, then gave a weak laugh. “I’m still here on Earth.”

“I did have my suspicions,” he began, aiming for humor in spite of the alarm bells beginning to sound in his mind to warn him that this might not just be a conversation, but a _Conversation._ “The buggery was a bit of a clue.”

Aziraphale bit his lip and nodded. Squeezed the fingers of his other hand tight. “They, ah… I don’t think either of them noticed you while you were here. But I… I wanted to know if you. Well. _Got away clean,_ as they say.”

“I didn’t let them see me outside the shop, no. I got well away before they left.”

The half-truth didn’t sit right with Crowley, and he knew Aziraphale had noticed it, too, but _bless it._ He’d been half out of his head with anxiety about this since he got down from the high of tricking Gabriel. The sex had proved a wonderful distraction from the fear, and he’d hoped on some level that it had been a distraction for Aziraphale, too. It hadn’t been, obviously. Not for long. That would have been too easy. Aziraphale, for all his reticence towards introspection most of the time, had an infuriating habit of latching on to inconsistencies in Crowley’s behavior and worrying away at them until he’d been given a satisfactory answer.

“They did… they did _see you,_ then,” Aziraphale pushed, his voice quiet.

Crowley shrugged, doing his best to seem casual. Unaffected. “Gabriel did, but like I said. It wasn’t near the shop. Cork Street, I think. I don’t think he… he didn’t suspect, ah…” Most of the ways he could end that sentence seemed too blunt, especially when Aziraphale was so visibly anxious. _‘He didn’t suspect that we’re fucking’_ was right out, and even _‘he didn’t suspect we have an Arrangement’_ seemed risky. Crowley waved a hand around as he looked for the right words, eventually settling on, “He didn’t know I’d been over here.”

Aziraphale’s mouth did something complicated as he looked at Crowley again. “I had worried that he might have tried to smite you.”

“Obviously he didn’t try hard enough,” Crowley said, then corrected course when he saw the look of horror blooming on Aziraphale’s face. “Kidding. Kidding, angel. He didn’t do anything like that. I think… I think he thought he was being sneaky. Secretly observing my evil wiles.”

“I… didn’t know. He didn’t say anything about it when he came back. Only that I was staying.” Aziraphale’s eyes had flicked around while he spoke, first at the ceiling and then at the door. They turned sharply back towards Crowley. “And that I was needed here to fight evil. Did you… did you do something, Crowley?”

Crowley looked down at the quilt. He hadn’t intended on ever telling Aziraphale what had happened—in fact, every part of him was screaming at him to not say anything. It could go so very wrong. It was the kind of thing he even worried about saying out loud, for himself and his own side, even here in private. This wasn’t something they’d ever admitted to doing, even within the Arrangement, and it felt so risky to put it into words.

More than that, though, he worried about Aziraphale. Could he get in trouble if Heaven learned he knew a demon had interfered on his behalf? Would Aziraphale be upset if he knew the truth?

He seemed like he was happy to still be on Earth, and this morning as Crowley had watched him through the bookshop window as he talked to his supervisors, Aziraphale had seemed _miserable_ at the prospect of being recalled to Heaven. At losing the bookshop he’d only just gotten. And he’d seemed so happy to see Crowley when he arrived—Crowley was considering fingering himself again later, once he was back in his own lodgings, just to press on the ache left over from the enthusiasm of the welcome Aziraphale had given him.

Well. That part was explainable, at least. Aziraphale loved Earthly pleasures. Heaven probably wasn’t too big on angels having sex Upstairs— _gosh, at least he hoped they weren’t_ —and Aziraphale had probably thought he might not have gotten another chance to have a shag for quite some time. It didn’t mean he would be happy that Crowley had been the one to keep him here. It didn’t mean that he was happy to be staying here _with Crowley,_ specifically. It didn’t even mean that he wouldn’t change his mind and decide to go Up if he heard the truth.

Because… Aziraphale did things all the time that he didn’t want to because he thought he was supposed to. Because he thought it was what Heaven wanted for him to do. God. The _Plan._ And again and again, Aziraphale took up all of his discomfort and his reservations and his own wants and needs and crushed them down inside a box marked _“Ineffability”_ and did whatever he was told.

Maybe Aziraphale was actually naive enough to think his being recalled really was intended to be a reward instead of another way Heaven could pull the rug out from under him.

Maybe he really thought that that purple-eyed git had actually changed his mind and let him stay in his shop out of goodwill.

Maybe Crowley had misread things, and Aziraphale actually _had_ wanted to go back Upstairs for good.

No. There was no way. Aziraphale was terrified of the lot of them, and Crowley knew that even if Aziraphale wouldn’t admit it. And it was for that reason, far more than for any of the deeply selfish other reasons he had for trying to keep Aziraphale on Earth, that Crowley refused to be sorry for doing what he’d done.

He still didn’t want to have to explain it, but… but Aziraphale wanted to know. Might even be safer if he had something closer to the full picture than if he were kept in the dark.

Besides, Crowley had never learned how to stop himself from giving Aziraphale anything he wanted.

“He saw me performing some Hellish business here in London,” Crowley said carefully. “Something staged, of course. To, ah. Remind him of how his side would benefit if there was someone here to thwart me.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale breathed.

“Not some wanker who’s never been on Earth,” he continued, something a touch fiercer weaving its way into his tone. “Someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Aziraphale’s lips quirked. “I’m… curious to know how you convinced him of that. Gabriel has been less than overjoyed at my performance in the past.”

He sounded… almost amused. Slightly self-deprecating, but amused. Definitely not angry or scared. Crowley could work with that, and found himself relaxing ever so slightly against the headboard.

“Well,” he said, picking the box of chocolates up and offering the selection to Aziraphale. To his delight, the angel took one. “As you know, I am very persuasive.”

“Tell me everything,” Aziraphale said, popping the chocolate into his mouth with a less-than-angelic hunger for gossip written plainly across his face.

The angel stretched his arm along the back of the headboard in what was clearly an invitation and Crowley felt one of his organs, probably somehow connected to his version of a digestive system, give a delighted squirm in response. Crowley himself followed suit and slithered up under that arm and all but glued himself to the side of Aziraphale’s chest. Aziraphale wrapped his arm around him, warm bare skin pressing against him on all sides, and for a moment Crowley was too stunned to speak.

He covered for his lapse by poaching a chocolate, chewing it slowly to stall. “Well, you see,” he finally said, “He came upon me while I was receiving word of your departure from my wicked demonic henchperson—”

_“Wicked demonic henchperson?”_ Aziraphale repeated, his voice pitching higher. “I didn’t know Hell gave field agents henchpersons. How long have you had one?”

Crowley looked up at him and gave him a toothy grin. “Ever since I picked the lock to the back door of Gabriel’s tailor and nicked one of the mannequins.”

Aziraphale gasped, his fingers hovering just below his lips as though he wanted to cover the smile that was threatening to break out across his face. “No. You didn’t. _He_ didn’t… A mannequin? Really?”

He replied with exaggerated seriousness. “I don’t think your boss is very bright, Aziraphale.”

“Gabriel is… very busy in Heaven,” Aziraphale said, lips twitching again. “And Earth is such a complicated, changing place. There are some things, nuances, he cannot be expected to… to understand immediately.”

“Nuances, yeah…” Crowley trailed off with a hum, resting his head against Aziraphale’s chest. One of the angel’s hands came up to card through his hair, and he felt himself going boneless.

“Go on, then,” Aziraphale prompted, sneaking another chocolate with the hand that had previously been draped across Crowley’s shoulder, temporarily pressing him closer against the angel’s body. When he straightened up again, he curled that arm around Crowley’s waist.

“Right, well. So, I put a cloak on the mannequin …” he began, feeling the quiet rumble of Aziraphale’s laughter all around him as he was held. He swallowed, then continued speaking in a voice that was raspy and ruined on purpose, thank you. _“Mister Crowley, your nemesis Aziraphale, the angel who has been thwarting you for so long, is being sent to Heaven!”_ Crowley gave a croaky, wicked-sounding chuckle, then spoke again—this time as himself, albeit with a rather theatrically devilish affect. Aziraphale’s silent laughter grew even more intense. _“Ah! Rejoice! Without him here to thwart me, I can do all manner of evil deeds. And to think, I might have drunk Holy Water in despair if that clever Principality had bested me again!”_

The hand that had been petting his hair stilled for the span of a few seconds, then slowly resumed its pace.

“Right,” Aziraphale said, slow and even. “I am… Well, it’s not that I didn’t consider it a—a great honor, for the two of them to, um. To offer me a new position. It’s not that at all. It’s only just…”

The angel’s body felt tense beneath him, and Crowley could feel him working himself into knots trying to talk about this without bad-mouthing Heaven or implying he liked being on Earth—messy, loud, chaotic Earth—better than in those sterile halls.

“Not thrilled by the possibility of an eternity of desk duty?” Crowley supplied, offering him an out. Aziraphale took it.

“Quite. And I suppose I should perhaps say…” he trailed off, once again struggling to figure out how to talk about this kind of thing with the Adversary currently cuddled up with him naked in his bed. Crowley thought he might be about to thank him, and he dreaded it. Instead, Aziraphale cleared his throat and said, “I’m happy Gabriel has finally taken you seriously as a threat. I’ve only been telling him as much for nearly six millennia in my reports.”

Crowley snorted. “And I’ve been telling you for almost as long that he doesn’t really read those.”

“He reads more than you’d think,” Aziraphale said, something distant in his voice. He seemed to shake himself out of whatever it had been, patting his own thighs through the quilt and jostling the last few chocolates in their box. “On that note, though… How did you like the new Effort?”

Crowley’s mouth opened and closed. _How did he like the new Effort?_ How did he like that perfect, thick, mouth-watering cock that had just fucked him into incoherence not fifteen minutes ago? His own spent cock twitched between his legs at the thought that he might show his appreciation in a more physical way—with his hands, with his tongue, any way Aziraphale wanted him.

Instead, he spat out something ridiculous and not at all sexy. “Great. Really—really top-notch cock you made there, angel.”

To Aziraphale’s credit, he didn’t laugh. Just gave a little smile that wrinkled his nose and said, “Oh, good. I thought I might keep it for a while.”

_What do you do when I’m not around?_ Crowley wondered, as he had so many times before.

An image came to mind of Aziraphale sitting in the chair beside the bed, that ruffled robe tugged up over his thick thighs as he worked a slicked hand over himself. His other hand perhaps sliding lower to cradle his balls—or further back still, fingers teasing at his hole. Fingering himself while he stroked. Crowley suspected Aziraphale’s collection of dildos was up here somewhere in the bedroom, too, and the picture _that_ painted had his own thighs flexing quite without his say so.

_Do you ever think of me?_

“I notice it’s new since last week,” Crowley said, his hand creeping beneath the quilt to trail along Aziraphale’s hip. “When did you switch?”

_Did you get to take it on a test drive, or was my hand the first to touch you like this?_

Inexplicable guilt flashed across Aziraphale's face. “Not long,” he said quickly. “Only since Monday morning. I had an appointment with my tailor before the grand opening and thought to myself, _well, then, old chap, now seems as good a time as any to try for it.”_

Crowley pulled his hand back, confused. “Try for it?”

“And really, my tailor—Mr. Bolesworth, I've spoken to you about him before. Charming fellow. Remarkable at his craft. But you see, I've been going to him since before, ah.” Aziraphale pulled a face, almost like a wince. “Well. Since I moved to Soho, really, and his profession requires certain knowledge that might otherwise not be… Well. While I don't think he would be so crass as to _mention_ that the penis I had when I first paid his shop call had since made a departure, I thought it best that he simply not notice anything... only the longer I did it, the more it seemed unfair to keep meddling with the poor man's mind like that.”

There was a lot being said, but Crowley was starting to connect dots, though he wasn’t sure if he was connecting them in the right order or if the dots that he had were even the right ones. Still, he thought he had perhaps figured at least one part of it out.

“Wait. Are you telling me you haven’t changed your Effort since the inn in Montmartre?”

Crowley switched out parts of his own body frequently, whenever the whim struck him—at least once a week, these days, and sometimes multiple times during the nights they spent together. Aziraphale had been wearing a vulva the whole time Crowley had been back in London, but Crowley hadn’t stopped to consider that it might have been the same one all this time. Not that it mattered, really. Aziraphale always moved a little slower, found things he liked and held onto them longer. That part made sense. The distress, however, did not.

Aziraphale's eyes flicked away, then back. “It was a very fine quim,” he began. “Terrific, really. And it wasn't that I didn't like it...”

“Aziraphale...”

“You did a bang-up job making it, and I've enjoyed it terribly all these years. I would never want to imply that I didn't...”

_“Aziraphale.”_

“Yes?”

“Why would I care about what you do to your own body?” Crowley shook his head. Waved a hand in the general direction of Aziraphale’s… everything. “It's yours. You can give yourself anything you like, whenever you like. There's no need to check in first.”

“Well… yes. I suppose. I just…” Aziraphale sighed. “It’s been such a long time, and I _know_ it was a risk. I’ve been… well. I should have said something. I’ve just been letting you do everything for me all these months. That isn’t exactly fair.”

“I… I’m not sure I follow.”

“Since I have the shop now, it didn’t seem like that same degree of austerity was strictly necessary—though of course, I’ve been easing into it.” Aziraphale breathed, long and shuddering, and his hands were worrying at his ring again. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. “No need to rush and burn myself out. Just small things here and there, nothing… nothing _showy._ And I think I have a bit of leeway as far as shop maintenance is concerned. Lighting fires, keeping the lamps lit. Things of that nature.”

Bit by bit, it all seemed to fall into place. At least eight years of curtailed miracles. Monitored miracles, too, by the sounds of it—or, at least, miracles they wanted Aziraphale to _think_ they were monitoring. From what he knew of Heaven these days, they seemed to enjoy making Aziraphale feel like he was simultaneously completely insignificant and, at the same time, like he was always being watched. Like they were always waiting for him to slip up.

Crowley knew how that felt. His supervisors didn’t seem to care nearly as much what he did during his day-to-day, but the end of each assignment was a hurdle. If he didn’t jump high enough, or far enough, or if they just felt like being arseholes that day… the pit underneath was deep and had lots of sharp things at the bottom.

“You’ve been…” Crowley said slowly, feeling the words out. “Testing out your limits with your miracles?”

“Yes! That’s it. Working up to… to things that might draw more notice. Over the last few months. There hasn’t actually been any _mention_ of my budget again, not in specific terms… And since I got the go-ahead to open the shop, well, I thought that perhaps…” Aziraphale cleared his throat. “It seemed fair to assume that regulations might have changed with—with my new role here.”

Crowley nodded, probably too fast. Too jerky. “Right, yeah… Probably. Probably so.”

It was all starting to make a terrible sort of sense.

The home Aziraphale built, when he’d been allowed to put down roots, wasn’t a _house._ It was public, a shop run by a shopkeeper who Crowley knew dreaded making his first sale. It was Heaven’s headquarters, with a sigil painted on the floor downstairs under the skylight. It was a cover, Crowley knew, for the angel to be able to do his book collecting and reading and literary chats out in the open. Hobbies he knew, based on the oblique little comments Aziraphale made now and again, that Heaven frowned on.

He’d had to get permission to build this place at all. And once it was done, had to get permission to add a flat on upstairs. Crowley looked down at the soft, narrow bed they were sitting on, and the sight of it—which, less than an hour ago, had filled him with an excitement he’d found hard to contain—made him furious. Aziraphale had _apologized_ for the size of it. Had said he’d had to make excuses to his higher-ups for why he needed a bedroom at all, let alone a bed. _“You can imagine,”_ Aziraphale had said, as though all of this were normal, _“what they might have thought if I’d gotten something bigger.”_

But of course, it was normal for people like them.

So, _of course_ he hadn’t switched up his Effort since they told him to watch his miracles. If Aziraphale had thought they’d been watching him closely enough that Aziraphale considered _lighting fires_ to be a noteworthy allowance, then of _course_ he hadn’t felt safe to modify his corporation—something he thought of as being Heaven’s property. In fact, Aziraphale had listed their disapproval of having his body damaged as _the_ reason why he would have saved himself from the guillotine in Paris had Crowley not intervened in time.

Crowley hated his bosses, hated the control they had over him. Hated that they could tell him to pick up and move to the other side of the planet whenever they bloody well pleased. Hated what could make him do, who they could make him be, how they could punish him if he failed. Hated the fact that they left him so little privacy, hated that they could decide on a whim that they wanted to up his quota for lust temptations for the year and would expect all the salacious details written up and filed in triplicate. To be stored for eternity in Dagon’s infinite files, able to be read by anyone who fancied a laugh.

They might be vicious bastards, but at least Hell didn’t tend to care how the work got done, so long as it did. Didn’t expect him to be happy about being their employee, either. Being hurt and terrified and paranoid about what they’d do to him next was routine, and it wasn’t a smart idea to look _too_ happy Downstairs if you didn’t want a surprise check-in from management down in the Pit. Being miserable was, after all, kind of the whole _point_ of Hell. But not even Hell checked his bloody miracle records to see how he modified his corporation in his off time.

Thank—well, not God. But thank _Someone_ they hadn’t taken Aziraphale back Up.

“I’d wanted to mention it, but…” Aziraphale began, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “Well, you know how these things go with head office. Sometimes the rules change. I didn’t want to say something and then have something different happen.”

“Wait. Wait. Which part did you think I’d be bothered by, here, angel?” Crowley shook his head, trying to surface from that miserable, angry place he’d found himself sinking into. “Because you’ve got to have realized how much I enjoyed the cock. Feel free to switch it up whenever you want.”

Aziraphale gave a thin smile. “I did realize that, actually. And it was… less that, and more that, well... I’ve been letting you do all the miracles for months. I could have at least started trying to pull my own weight.”

“It’s all been such little stuff, angel. It’s not like I’ve been burning myself out. And…” He cleared his throat. “You know. If you ever want another swap that won’t show up on your records, I can… I won’t ever mind doing it.”

That smile widened, started to reach the angel’s eyes. “I might take you up on that. I remember how good it felt that first time. Though… I must admit. Most times, I’m as happy with one Effort as I am with any other. The reason it became a priority to make the swap was less about desire and more about…”

The angel trailed off, lips pursing as he considered his words.

“Wanting to know if you could?” Crowley offered. Autonomy was a rare commodity in his line of work, and in Aziraphale’s. He could see the value in having that kind of control restored.

“I suppose that’s… about as close an answer as any. And, you know… Crowley, can I let you in on a secret?” Leaning forward a bit in spite of himself, Crowley nodded. Aziraphale’s voice dropped to a stage whisper. “I don’t know if it counts.”

“If… the miracle counts?”

“I did it six times Monday morning, just to test it.”

Crowley gaped at him. “What… just. Just… back and forth?”

“And off and on. I thought that if… that if pressed, I could say—quite honestly—I was tweaking my corporation to make it better fit in a circumstance where humans were likely to see me in a state of undress.”

“So, you’re saying you sat there and went _cunt, nothin’, cock… cunt, nothin’, cock,”_ Crowley said, playing the world’s most obscene game of rock paper scissors all by himself. “To see if… if someone would descend from a beam of sunlight and tell you to knock it off and stop abusing company resources?”

“That makes it sound so silly, but yes. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“I don’t think it sounds silly.” Crowley pushed his luck and leaned back in under Aziraphale’s arm. To his delight, it wrapped around his shoulders and pulled him in against the angel’s side. “And it worked, didn’t it? They didn’t tell you off, did they?”

Aziraphale shook his head, his eyes closing even as they looked up towards the ceiling. “To tell the truth, it’s been a… a long time. Since they said anything about it at all. I wonder sometimes if—if they forgot to tell me I was done. That I was allowed to go back to the way things were.” Before Crowley could retort, Aziraphale continued. “That’s probably what it is. I’m told things are very busy in Heaven right now. New millennium and all that.”

The angel reached into the chocolate box and withdrew his hand in surprise.

“It looks like there’s only one left…”

“Go on, angel. It’s yours. You’re the new bookshop owner. And m’full, anyway.”

When Aziraphale had finished eating it, Crowley reached up to him and kissed the taste from his lips. There were still three hours until dawn broke, and he intended to spend all of that time telling Aziraphale how happy Crowley was that he was still here. Not in words, of course, but in kisses and shoulder rubs and a thousand other gestures he hoped would carry the message.

He didn’t think he’d ever be able to fix what Heaven did, no more than he thought Aziraphale could fix what Hell had broken in him. He wasn’t even sure the two of them _could_ be fixed, or if they were like this because that was all they could be. Just two pawns that Aziraphale _swore_ were doing their part in the Plan.

But he could be here. Laying across Aziraphale’s lap, under a warm quilt in a bed—and a home—that was never meant to fit more than one, laughing with him in the latest hours of the night. Loving him quietly, too quiet to hear past the dull roar of fear that Aziraphale’s _side_ called Love, but loving him all the same.

Damn him, but he wanted to be here. For as long as he could, and then some. In spite of— _because of_ —the fact that he would never be able to stay forever. He could stay until dawn, and figure the rest out later.  


* * *

  
_Later_ came far sooner than he expected. Four days later, in fact, when Crowley woke up to the faint prickle of infernal energy stinging his nose like breathing in capsaicin. He got out of bed ready to either fight or grovel, depending on which coworker was in his flat, and was relieved to discover that he was alone. That meant that there must be a message for him, though, and after a quick search of the small flat with a letter opener tucked up his sleeve, he found it.

Well. It wasn’t painted on the wall in dripping blood, or sent over in the teeth of a Hellhound, which seemed to imply they were gradually modernizing. They’d even put it in envelope with his name on the outside. How courteous, aside from the fact that it was sitting in a burn mark on the floorboards in the room where he kept his plants. Crowley could tell just by looking at it that it was a new assignment. Commendations tended to make the whole room smell like rotten eggs, and reprimands... well. Like he'd told Aziraphale in Paris, Hell didn't tend to contact him ahead of time for those and ask him to clear his schedule before yanking him down to face the wrath of whichever supervisor he managed to piss off this time.

Sure enough, he was expected to be on his way to Berlin no later than Thursday. His next lunch with Aziraphale was supposed to be on Saturday. He thought about going over to the bookshop, installing himself in that narrow bed in the flat upstairs, and camping out until the last minute before he had to leave.

But... that wasn't the kind of thing they did. They didn't _play house._ This was the same Arrangement it had always been, and the Arrangement depended on the appearance of coincidence. Of their just... happening to be in the same place at the same time. They needed to plan their visits carefully to avoid suspicion. There was also a risk that Hell would be in touch again, maybe in person, or would call Crowley Downstairs to give a report before he left. He wanted to be as far away from the bookshop as possible if either of those things happened. Not only did he not want his bosses to see Aziraphale… he didn’t really want Aziraphale to see his bosses. Or who Crowley was when he was around his bosses.

Besides, the bookshop shop was open now. Aziraphale would be busy chatting with bookish humans and his Soho neighbors. Giving book recommendations that subtly implied that customers should find copies of those novels in other people’s shops. Doling out tiny blessings to the ones that took the hint. Crowley was sure Aziraphale wouldn't want him underfoot right now, not when he had so many new things to do to occupy his time and attention. Not when Crowley was all… all mopey and prone to clinging.

_“Never stick around long enough to make him ask you to leave.”_ The rule had worked well for him so far. He supposed he ought to stick to it, even when he didn’t want to. Especially when he didn’t want to.

Crowley sent a note to the bookshop, brief and vague as always. _“Have to cancel Saturday,”_ it said. _“Job in Berlin.”_

By lunch, he got his reply. _“Mind how you go. A.”_

He noticed that, for once, it was signed—just an initial, nothing too significant, not worth… getting worked up about. Just one letter on a page that was burned within a quarter of an hour. Even if it had been significant, it wasn’t something he could leave lying around.

Moving to new lodgings was almost always a fast process for Crowley. He did it often enough that by now he had it down to a science. He was attached to very few of his possessions. A couple of art pieces, like that drawing of Leo’s. The rest of his furniture items were essentially set pieces to make it looked like a human being lived in his space. Anything that he wanted to keep got tossed in one of his personal storage voids until he was staying somewhere long enough for it to be worth it for him to unpack. Everything else was abandoned. The only things he ever had physically shipped to his new address were his plants, as they tended to wilt when he tried to leave them in a pocket dimension and teleporting them tended to give them root rot.

His collection was small right now, but healthy. Shoddy as this flat was, it had good light, and the whole lot of them were thriving after only ten months of being here. One of them, that same bloody fern that had been such a nuisance to bring up the stairs when he'd moved in originally, had swelled up to such a size that moving it in a crate would be impractical. Sure, he could have shrunk it down, or miracled up a crate that was bigger on the inside, or even just pruned it, but Crowley didn't want to think too much about plant logistics right now. He wanted to go on a sulk until Thursday, stay very drunk that whole time, and not think about much of anything.

There was an old woman who lived in the flat next to him who kept philodendrons in her window. They hadn't ever spoken, but Crowley felt her envy when she'd watched him move in his own plants. When the time came for him to leave for Berlin, the rest of the greenery packed up and ready to be sent over on a ship after him, that fucking enormous fern ended up outside her door.

It wasn't a gift. It was... inspiring greed and encouraging covetousness. And he wasn't even planning on letting her keep it. He'd break into her flat the next time he was assigned to London and take it back.  


* * *

  
She'd died by the time he came back again, and the run-down old building they'd both lived in had been torn down.

Crowley never did find out what had happened to the fern.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Continued Content Notes:**  
>  CONTEXT SPOILERS: Although he had already changed his body by this point in the story (off-page between chapters 7 and 8), Aziraphale confesses to Crowley in this chapter that he continued wearing a vulva past the point he might have otherwise switched to some other genital configuration because he was afraid of Heaven monitoring his miracle use. He wasn’t _trapped_ with that configuration, exactly, and didn’t dislike having a vulva or the kind of sex he had while he had one. He also had options for swapping it out for something new (including asking Crowley for help), but for a long time he felt as though he didn’t have the autonomy to change his body himself on his own schedule without anyone else’s input. It was the lack of control, more so than the presence of a body part he disliked/absence of a part he wanted, that was upsetting to him.
> 
> Oof. Definitely did _not_ start this fic out intending to write a little episode of what feels a bit close to gender dysphoria, y’all, but I am but a screaming frog stuck in the passenger seat while this story drives me through the on-fire M-25.
> 
> Also, just to clarify. For the purposes of this story, although both of them have so far only used he/him pronouns and had masculine-ish presentation, Aziraphale and Crowley both are nonbinary and have very little attachment to any particular genital set beyond “what’s the most fun and/or practical thing to have in my pants right now.”  
>  ~~I’m not saying all the GO fic I ever write _is_ wish fulfillment for my fantasy of having a Mr. Potatohead body where I can swap out parts at will, but I’m not _not_ saying that either.~~  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> **Historical Note:** The title of this chapter, “Panopticon,” is a reference to a prototype for a prison designed in 1791 by Jeremy Bentham (a truly WILD dude, y’all, holy shit, he’s also the University College London mummy guy _apparently_ ).  
> The idea, in brief, is that prison cells are built up in a ring around a central guard tower. The guard in the tower can see into any cell whenever they want, but the prisoners never know where the guard is looking. Since the prisoners cannot know if they are being watched or not from moment to moment, they must operate as though they are always being watched: constantly on their best behavior with no safe option to relax or disobey. Efficient for the guards, terrifying and exhausting for the prisoners. Perpetual surveillance with minimal effort.
> 
> Is Heaven in the canon GO universe operating like a panopticon? I’d argue that if the Archangels were actually unaware of Aziraphale’s shenanigans until Michael got the pictures, it certainly seems like it. Especially if the Earth Observation Files are stocked with passively gathered data. It does seem like the leadership has the potential to be constantly looking at everything all at once, and likes to give off the impression that they _are_ constantly looking, but choose to do other things with their time. Like hoverboarding, maybe.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> As you may have noticed, I’ve given this fic, the other two in the series, and the series itself new summaries/notes. The little blurbs weren’t cutting it for me anymore, so now they also have quotes from the fics.  
> I’d like to tell you that chapter 11 won’t be quite so fucking, uh… heavy? Fraught, maybe? Anyway, I’d like to tell you that, but I can’t. I don’t think it’s quite as intense as this one, but the next section gets me straight in my climate change anxieties.
> 
> On that note… The next chapter will be up **Wednesday September 23rd** with a preview up on tumblr beforehand for WIP Wednesday if I can swing it. Why a Wednesday update this time? Because September 23rd is the one-year posting anniversary of this series. It’s been a good run, y’all. Thanks for coming along with me. <3


	11. Sunset

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “My eyes,” Crowley began. “They changed when I Fell. I… I don’t remember what they looked like Before. Only that they surprised me the first time I saw them, because they hadn’t been like that the last time I’d seen them.” He cleared his throat, surprised with the ease with which he was saying this. He’d never… never said any of this before out loud. “Didn’t know what to call them yet. Didn’t know what a snake was, not until the Garden. Just knew they were different. Demonic. Sulfur yellow. Thought they were… were pretty cool, though. ‘Specially when I saw the ugly mugs some of the others ended up with. See in the dark pretty well, too. That’s useful.”
> 
> Aziraphale had listened to the whole meandering story with rapt attention, his own blue eyes wide and round. When Crowley trailed off, the angel gave his knee another squeeze and said, “Go on?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, pssst. Do you want _another_ song pairing that goes with this chapter? Please consider [Two](https://youtu.be/PrDzd4ufypE) by Sleeping at Last.
> 
> **Content Notes:** Angsty, emotionally painful sex and miscommunication. Always consensual, though not always pretty.  
> Kind of heavy shame and panic, including a moment during sex that’s pretty close to a full-on panic attack. They talk about it, though, I promise.  
> Brief, light-detail discussion of historical plagues and famines, with more detail in the end note.  
> Hard drinking.  
> Extended aftermath of a natural disaster (volcanic eruption) with global impact. One of the key points is that there are chemicals/dust/haze in the air.
> 
> The boys are in no immediate danger, but this topic and the anxiety it provokes sets the tone for the whole chapter and much of the next. Aziraphale is terrified about climate change, and so am I as the author. 
Additional warning for brief discussion in the (massive, Ao3 character-limit-breaking) end note of parallels to the current US West Coast and Australian wildfires, including linked (not embedded) images.

> 
>   
> Chapter specific sex acts: oral sex.  
> Aziraphale has a (cute) penis. Crowley stays fully clothed, so we must assume that what he has down there is a (cute, yet literal) scaly, hissing trouser serpent.  
> That tag up in the top tags that says, “emotionally fraught blowjobs”? I put it on the fic because of this chapter.

**London, 1816**

Over the years, Crowley and Aziraphale fell into something like a routine. On the surface, it was exactly like their Arrangement had always been. They met up when they could—when it wouldn’t attract notice. It was easier to find excuses to be in the same place these days, even if it was still difficult to find the time to.

Downstairs was interested in the promises Crowley was spinning about his long-term project on industrialization and the assembly line, and bought his excuses for slinking off back to London between other jobs—sometimes only for a few days, other times as long as a few months—as time spent checking up on his work there. He kept up a handful of London properties, all in varying degrees of extravagance or destitution depending on the type of human he needed to pretend to be when he was in town. Aziraphale was almost always hard at work in his Soho shop, and therefore easy to locate when Crowley could get away. Heaven seemed to be leaving him more or less to his own devices, aside from a few meetings Upstairs and the occasional mission that called him away from England.

It was almost perfect, aside from the fact that each time they had to part, it felt harder and harder for Crowley to make himself leave.

The best nights, in Crowley’s opinion, were the ones where they tangled up almost immediately, made love— _fucked_ —as soon as they got the front door locked and stumbled towards the nearest mostly horizontal surface. Towards the sofa rapidly developing a dent in the shape of their bodies, or up the stairs to the flat and Aziraphale’s narrow, soft mattress. On the floor between a pair of bookshelves if they couldn’t make it that far. Those nights were the best because once they were satisfied, worn out, basking in the afterglow, there was often time to sit and talk awhile. Hours, sometimes, before the dawn, when they could right their clothes again and laugh and drink, or else stay tangled and sweaty in the sheets and gossip about the people they’d met and the things they’d seen.

They didn’t shag every time they met up. Especially on those longer trips, they’d sometimes just meet up to plan, or to visit the theatre together, or do some other thing in public where they had to pretend they were just a half step up from being strangers to each other. Sometimes, they’d go back to the bookshop with every intention of fucking and never actually get around to it. Usually this was either because they’d gotten far too into playing cards, or because they’d found something to talk about that was interesting enough that they didn’t notice the time until they looked up and saw sunlight out the windows. Crowley loved those nights, too. More than he was willing to examine.

They mostly stuck to the pattern of keeping the visits at least a week apart, with one notable exception in the summer of 1816.

It had been a wretched year. Completely exhausting. Aziraphale had just gotten back from a month in Ireland, burned out from trying to do the best he could with the typhus outbreak. Crowley was constantly fielding inquiries from Dagon about the newest conflict or riot, and generally trying to keep up with the pace of human misery. He was also perpetually irritated and sluggish from the never-ending fog and chilly rain—his body just didn’t seem to want to cope with it. The winter before had been bitterly cold, too, and if Hell hadn’t insisted that he work through it, Crowley would have found someplace warm and hibernated until spring. Of course, if he’d done that, he might still be asleep. He’d waited and waited for the thaw, for the sun to come out and the heat to return, but it didn’t. Months passed. February rolled into March, then April into May, June into July… and winter still did not end.

Even though Crowley had been able to sneak over to London for a few weeks that unnaturally cold summer, work kept them so busy they rarely had a chance to meet up during the daytime. But the evenings, on the other hand…

It was rare to have Aziraphale be the one to reach out first, even in his odd roundabout way. It started off as a somewhat subtle thing, implications and suggestions rather than actual invitations, hints that said that the angel wouldn’t be put out if Crowley were to come over after the shop closed. There were books he wanted to show him. Arguments he thought they hadn’t quite settled. Chess matches he insisted on revisiting because Crowley had cheated the night before. A bottle of something strong that wouldn’t drink itself. Sometimes Crowley would get there and discover that the real reason was something sexual, like a new toy he’d wanted to try out. A collection of erotic poems Aziraphale had found that had clearly gotten the angel rather adorably randy. It didn’t matter much what Aziraphale told him. Crowley seized upon each flimsy excuse with both hands and did his best not to poke holes in them.

That wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was that Aziraphale kept making those suggestions, sometimes multiple nights running. After he’d been in London for two weeks, Crowley realized he’d only spent three of those nights in his own lodgings.

This night in particular had started with an alcohol-based excuse, and Aziraphale already had a glass in hand by the time Crowley came over at sunset.

“Good lord, would you look at that…” Aziraphale said as he let Crowley in the back door. His eyes went first to Crowley’s face, then up above him to the strip of sky that was visible between his building and the one across the alley.

“Yeah, stopped raining for about ten minutes,” Crowley grumbled, pushing past him into the warmth of the back room. “Haven’t been so thrilled for a change in weather since the Ark.”

“It’s not that…” He was still in the doorway. Peeking his head out, craning his neck to try to see past the overhand of the roof. “Is that… is that just the sunset? It’s incredibly vivid…”

Crowley paused by the coat rack, hands hovering on the knot of his scarf. “D’you want to go watch it?”

“I… I’m not sure,” Aziraphale hedged. “How would that look? Two men hanging about in the street, just… staring up at the sky?”

There were ways around that if Aziraphale was worried about it. Crowley could stay inside while Aziraphale stepped out, they could direct the attention of the humans away, they could draw the curtains and watch through the windows…

“Does the bookshop have roof access?” Crowley asked.

Apparently, it did. Sometimes. _When the building feels like it,_ as Aziraphale said. Crowley had been a bit surprised to see that Aziraphale led them into the bedroom—after all, with the amount of time he’d spent on his back on the bed over the years, he thought he was pretty familiar with what the ceiling looked like up there. But, as Aziraphale explained in the tone of voice that humans used to inform others about the new tricks their offspring have learned, when the bookshop decided to sprout a hatch and a pull-down ladder it liked to do so next to the angel’s chest of drawers upstairs.

Most of the roof was taken up by the dome housing the oculus that looked in on the sigil on the shop floor, but there was some flat, walkable space behind and around the sides of it. Aziraphale found a spot for them to stand that was a little more out of the way, with the dome between the two of them and the street. He pressed a cup of something warm and alcoholic into Crowley’s hand and stood beside him, quiet and pensive, as he watched the sun go down.

“Sky’s really red,” Crowley commented, blowing on his drink before taking a sip. It was a hot toddy, apparently, and a strong one. He hadn’t checked what it was before, had just accepted what he was handed.

The angel hummed in agreement, his eyes on the horizon. He’d been right. It really was a gorgeous sunset, if a little eerie. Dramatic. Scarlet. Not red like blood, nothing so morbid as that, but red like a blackened log cracked open in a hearth. Like molten metal. The sun itself looked faint behind the thick haze in the air, struggling to shine at all. The color was spilled across the entire sky, diffused and scattered by the fog and clouds, bathing anything pale or reflective in fiery light and reducing everything else to shadow. The city below looked like nothing more than a vague tangle of shapes, featureless and dark, and Aziraphale…

Aziraphale looked resplendent. Like a stained-glass window, he was designed to catch the sunlight. His face was tilted up to the sky and every plane of his face was awash with the warm glow of the setting sun. The color bled into his fair hair and highlighted every gentle curl, and each breath he exhaled into the cold evening air was lit ablaze. Crowley’s eyes tracked down his body, catching on those few sparkling indulgences the angel allowed himself—the chain of his pocket watch, the buttons of his waistcoat, the ring on his finger, even the amber whisky in his glass. All of it gleaming and gold in the fading light. Not for the first time, Crowley wished he could pause reality and live in this moment forever.

“It’s a bit…” Aziraphale began, fingers flicking the rim of his tumbler. “… Hellish, isn’t it?”

Crowley tore his eyes away from the angel and looked back at the sky. He supposed he could see it as being a bit ominous. A little _too_ red. But Hellish, specifically?

“Nah,” he said. “Hell is a lot less... well. Just a lot _less._ Less bright. Less colorful. S’not all fire and brimstone and lava. Terribly boring, really.”

“Oh.”

He rotated where he stood, turning away from the vivid western sky and more towards the north and east where the heavens were still clinging to daylight.

“Over there,” Crowley said, pointing up at a patch of clouds that were streaked along the edges with a sickly yellow. “That’s probably as close as you’ll get to Hellish. Color of sulfur. Still a lot of that hanging about, particularly on the lower levels. Actually, that might actually _be_ sulfur up there, I’m not sure. Might just be a light thing, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Volcanic ash.” He waved vaguely at the sky with one hand while he took a long sip of his drink, holding the warmth in his mouth for a moment before he spoke. “S’what makes up the haze.”

“Ah.”

They stood together on the roof, near one another but not touching, until the sky was dark. Crowley’s hands had gone cold and stiff around his teacup, long since empty, but he didn’t want to say anything. It wasn’t often that they just got to _be_ like this outdoors without some excuse or deadline or message to convey.

“Goodness,” Aziraphale said, seeming to shake himself out of whatever reverie he’d been in. There was a roughness to his voice. “Let’s… let’s go back inside. You must be freezing.”

He took Crowley’s cup from him and began to shoo him towards the hatch.

“I’ll live,” Crowley said. “Just give me some more of that whisky and I’ll warm right up again. With or without the tea.”

Crowley opened the hatch and started the climb down. He thought, for just a moment, that Aziraphale’s eyes looked a bit puffy in the when he looked up at him. By the time they were both down the ladder and in Aziraphale’s bedroom again the angel looked calm and unaffected.

“I left the bottle at my desk,” Aziraphale told him. “If you’d like, I can bring it back up here.”

“Don’t mind going down there, either.” Crowley said, shrugging. Casual. Like he hadn’t seen anything that Aziraphale hadn’t wanted him to. “Sofa is fine, too.”

Once downstairs, they stripped off their shoes and coats and cravats but felt no urgency to undress any further. They kissed, too, but likewise made no move to do anything more, at least not yet. There was a slight chill from the window behind Aziraphale’s desk, and Crowley used it as an excuse to fling his legs into the angel’s lap, tuck his bare feet up under Aziraphale’s thigh, and not move from that position. At Aziraphale’s insistence, Crowley also draped himself in one of the downstairs blankets, in turn wearing it across his lap, over his shoulders like a shawl, over his head like some kind of hood, and twisted around his body like a chrysalis. The transformation happened at pace with their slow tilt into intoxication.

He kept an eye on Aziraphale through most of their conversation, but the angel didn’t show any further signs of distress. If anything, he seemed lighter and more carefree than expected, given how tired Crowley knew he must be. Even the silence they fell into was relaxed. Crowley himself slipped into drowsiness first, slithering around to put his head in the angel’s lap instead. Aziraphale by now seemed trained to interpret that as a signal to put his fingers in Crowley’s hair, which was a smart conclusion, as that was always what Crowley wanted at all moments. Between the gentle scratching of Aziraphale’s rounded fingernails on his scalp and the comforting rise and fall of his breathing, Crowley couldn’t help but close his eyes.

At some point—minutes later, or maybe hours—the hand in his hair must have stilled and slipped away, because when Aziraphale spoke and roused Crowley from his doze, it was gone.

“Do you think it’s time, then?”

“Time?” Crowley repeated as he pried his eyes open again. He was deeply relaxed, warm and pleasantly drunk, but there was something in the angel’s tone that made him want to pay attention.

Aziraphale was almost always mobile in some way. When he was pleased, he shimmied and wiggled and smiled with the kind of expression that crinkled his eyes and dimpled the apples of his cheeks. When he was upset, he fidgeted and worried his clothes and the ring on his finger, and his anxieties wrote themselves out across the quirk of his lips and the twitch of his brow. Crowley liked to think he had such an easy time reading Aziraphale’s emotional state because of how much time he’d spent observing the angel, but the truth was, Aziraphale was normally very open with how he felt. He showed it with his whole body.

Now, though, there was an odd stillness to him. It was strange, because they were both pleasantly soused, Aziraphale having reached the closest thing to a slouch he ever allowed himself, and yet, his face was blank and his gaze was distant. It was like he’d been on his way to sliding into a comfortable stupor and had frozen on the way down, like he’d found some melancholy in the depths of their bottle that had pulled him out of his reverie and left him unsettled.

Despite how intensely Crowley was watching him, Aziraphale refused to look back at him. He was staring at something—or, more likely, nothing—somewhere on the opposite wall of the shop, near the corner of the two walls and the ceiling.

When he spoke, his voice was low and purposely even. He didn’t slur his words, seemingly spending the effort to say each one as clearly as he could. “Do you think it’s the end of the world?”

Loathe as he was to leave the warmth of Aziraphale’s lap, Crowley felt they ought to be face to face for this, and so he stretched and repositioned himself into a more upright sprawl. He let the blanket droop back down around his shoulders.

“How d’you mean?”

“It’s July, Crowley. There’s frost on the window, and I read in the paper that—in Italy, they said the snow fell from the sky red as blood. In America, there’s a, a great sulfurous fog that won’t fade for anything.” Aziraphale swallowed. “Typhus. Cholera. People are starving. People are rioting because they’re starving—”

“That’s not what this is.” Crowley shook his head, feeling a bit like a ragdoll. “We’ve seen all four of ‘em workin’ before. Together, sometimes, but it’ssss’not like—but they haven’t been _called._ We’d have heard.”

_“You don’t know that,”_ Aziraphale whispered.

“Did your lot tell you anything?” Crowley asked, watching the angel’s expression for any sign of movement, any trace of further distress, and _oh,_ it was such a terrible thing to see. The tremble in his lip, the way he bit down on it to keep it still as he shook his head. “Mine either.”

He wanted to reach out, to _soothe,_ but he wasn’t sure if his touch would be welcome right now. He kept his hands flat on the tops of his thighs, and Aziraphale kept his on either side of him on the cushions of the sofa, holding on so tightly Crowley feared the padding would rip.

Finally, Aziraphale tilted his head to look at him. “Do you think they would? Do you think they would tell us?”

“‘Course they would,” Crowley said with as much confidence as he could feign. “We’re their field agents, angel. They’d have to let us know. They’d probably want us… I dunno. But they wouldn’t _keep_ it from us.”

“Your side might tell you. They _like_ you—”

“They _don’t,”_ he said, too quick and too sharp. He was too drunk, and there were things the angel couldn’t be allowed to hear crowding too close to the surface. “Demons don’t like other demonss,” he spit out, and he hoped there wouldn’t be more questions.

“Of course not, I didn’t mean—but it’s just. They expect good— _bad_ work from you. You tempted Eve. You inspired Caligula. You started the Inquisition—”

“I didn’t, angel, you know that,” Crowley whispered.

“But _they_ don’t. They think you’re a good— _a competent_ demon. They’d tell _you.”_

There were things he could say to that, stories he could tell that would put a lie to Aziraphale’s faith in him, but he didn’t want to. The more important thing was what Aziraphale wasn’t saying, and Crowley knew he had to tread carefully. It was tricky getting to get the words to line up right when his head was fuzzy.

“D’you think they wouldn’t tell you?”

_“I don’t—I don’t know.”_ Aziraphale’s chin quivered, and Crowley couldn’t stand it.

“Listen,” Crowley said, leaning forward and bolstering all his weight on the arm draped along the back of the sofa. “My side’s said nothing. We’re sssssafe.” He tried not to cringe at the way his hiss elongated the last part. The _lie._ They weren’t ever safe, not even here in this place Aziraphale built to hide away in.

“Would you tell me?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley knew he shouldn’t expect anything different, but he’d thought they were past this by now. If not trust, then at least familiarity. _Routine._ But maybe he just needed to hear it again, put words to what Crowley had been saying in actions for hundreds of years now, since he’d first been allowed to start showing it.

“First thing, I promise,” he said, keeping steady eye contact despite the growing urge to look away. He was grateful for the sunglasses. “We have an Arrangement. We help each other out. I’d tell you.”

Aziraphale nodded, and the silence stretched on and on. Crowley knew he shouldn’t expect anything, should have known this was the kind of thing the angel couldn’t say out loud, but he felt a growing pang of fear.

_If it happened, if I didn’t know… would he tell me?_

“Do you want a distraction?” Crowley finally asked, as much for himself as for the angel sitting beside him.

“A distraction?” Aziraphale repeated, something creaky in his voice. “What kind of distraction?”

“Anything you’re up for. Could… dunno. Go for a walk or something.”

“At night?”

“None of the humans’ll bother us.”

“But it’s… but it’s so cold.”

“Doesn’t have to be a walk. Could stay right here on the sofa if you’d like. Just… something besides sitting here worrying about things that are a long way off.” Crowley tilted his head and looked down at Aziraphale’s stockinged feet, his toes curled and worrying the edge of the rug beside the sofa. “Hey. I’ve got an idea. Take your socks off.”

“Pardon?” Aziraphale said, feet going flat on the floor like he’d only just noticed he was fidgeting with them. “What are you planning to do with my socks?”

“Puppet show,” Crowley drawled as he slid off the sofa onto the ground, dragging the blanket behind him like a cape. He settled cross-legged at Aziraphale’s feet and drew them into his lap, hands creeping up one leg of the angel’s trousers to undo his garter.

“Crowley, don’t be ridiculous.”

“M’not.” He pulled the stocking off in one long motion, then tossed it and the garter up on the seat beside the angel. “Put those somewhere.”

Aziraphale complied, reaching over to set those and their mates on the seat of the chair at his desk. He turned back to look at Crowley, an eyebrow raised in question.

“Right. Now, the next thing I need you to do is sit there and relax.” Crowley set one of the angel’s feet back down on the floor and lifted the other up to the level of his chest. He pressed both thumbs into the arch of Aziraphale’s foot, working slow circles into weary muscle and bone.

“Why?” Aziraphale asked, looking down at him with a hazy sort of confusion.

“Because.” A long drag down to his heel. “You’re tense.”

“I’m not tense!”

Crowley looked at him over the tops of his sunglasses. “Really?” He reached up and cupped the back of Aziraphale’s calf through his trousers, making the angel suck in a breath through his lips, and squeezed the muscle there. “Because you feel very tensssse.”

“I assure you, I am—I am perfectly alright.”

“You are tense, Aziraphale,” Crowley said, pronouncing each syllable with care so he would neither hiss nor slur. “I didn’t know it was possible for a living being to be this drunk and still be this tense, but you are. You are so tense you are making _me_ tense, so just sit there and get your feet rubbed.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth as if to retort, but then said nothing. He settled his hands on the tops of his thighs and relaxed his leg into Crowley’s grip. Crowley took it as an opportunity to press harder on the angel’s instep. Seemingly in spite of himself, Aziraphale sighed and relaxed just a fraction further.

Crowley worked slowly and methodically, applying all of his inebriated concentration to one foot and then the other. By the time both feet were on the ground again, Aziraphale had closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the sofa. Crowley scooted closer and put a hand on each ankle, rubbing his way up the angel’s legs until he was working out the tension in the underside of Aziraphale’s knees. He pressed a kiss into each one, at the very bottom of his inner thighs, and he heard Aziraphale make some noise that might uncharitably be compared to a squeak.

He looked up and saw the angel’s face had gone all pink at the cheeks. Crowley slithered his hands around to the tops of his thighs, squeezing higher and higher until his hands covered Aziraphale’s.

Some part of Crowley’s brain registered that if he were more sober, he’d probably wouldn’t make the first move like this. Not without getting a more overt sign from Aziraphale—somewhere between _“a burning bush”_ and _“a flood wiping out tens of thousands of human lives”_ on the Subtle Signs Scale, ideally, or maybe just a written invitation asking him to participate in the act of fornication. He and Aziraphale had been fucking for twenty-four years now, and yet Crowley could count on one hand the number of times he had personally shifted things from casual conversation into sex. This whole new layer to their Arrangement… he needed for it to be at Aziraphale’s direction. His own desire was bottomless, his own appetites for time and attention and touch endless. Anything Aziraphale was willing to share with him was something he wanted, but he couldn’t risk asking for too much.

Tonight, though, he was drunk and struggling to remember why he didn’t ask more often. In the warm, comfortable bookshop—Aziraphale’s home—with his best friend’s body relaxing under his touch, it was easy to forget that this wasn’t an actual _relationship._ That as friendly and domestic as this could feel, they had no real ties to each other. Under the amber haze of whisky, it all felt so simple. Aziraphale was anxious, tense, and frightened. Crowley could bring him pleasure and, just for a little while, let him forget. That old familiar terror of being pushed away felt very small, and so Crowley took a risk that, in the moment, didn’t feel so risky at all.

“Feels good?” Crowley asked. Aziraphale nodded and opened his eyes, looking marvelously flustered. “D’you want me to keep going?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Anything,” he said, stroking the back of the angel’s hands with his thumbs. “You wouldn’t have to do a thing. Jus’ sit there and let yourself feel good. I’d take care of the resssssst.”

“I think…” Aziraphale began, wiggling in his seat, then frowned when he seemed to sway more than intended. “Perhaps I might be too drunk to enjoy it properly if you did.”

“S’okay. Don’t have to.”

“I want to, I think. I think I’d like to…” The angel made a fluttering gesture around his head.

“Alright.”

They sobered up, their heads almost knocking together as they both leaned forward. One of them, probably Aziraphale, made some kind of grunt. As it always was, the cold crash of sobriety was miserable and left Crowley with a faint throbbing in his head and a fuzzy tongue. Before he even had a chance to complain about it, Aziraphale’s hands were on the sides of his head, thumbs soothing his temples.

“Easy does it…” Crowley mumbled, kneading the broad, plush thighs under his hands.

Aziraphale kissed the top of his head and straightened up. “I shouldn’t have gotten that drunk,” he said, a little laugh tacked onto the end like an apology. It was in that laugh that Crowley could hear the rest of what Aziraphale meant in saying what he did. The embarrassment he must be feeling. The careful distancing from the things he’d said, the fear he’d shown. The doubt he’d let Crowley see, normally hidden behind a wall of faith as thick as Eden’s.

“None of that now.” Crowley squeezed a bit tighter, just to draw Aziraphale’s attention. He looked up into those storm-blue eyes and swayed where he sat, a little unsure if he was playing at being the snake or the snake charmer. The blanket slid off his shoulders and pooled behind him on the rug. “I am being terribly distracting. Hush, and be distracted.”

“Alright then.” Aziraphale settled back against the back of the sofa. Still stiff, but clearly trying not to be. It was a start.

The angel’s anxiety was a powerful force, but then again, so was Crowley’s singlemindedness. While he massaged Aziraphale’s legs from knees to hips, he also pressed a long chain of kisses into his inner thighs through the soft fabric of his trousers. Every so often he’d dip his hands close to Aziraphale’s groin, only to pull them back a moment later. Sometimes, in the course of working the tension out from Aziraphale’s knees, it became necessary to push his legs just a bit wider apart. Each hitch he heard in Aziraphale’s breath felt like a victory.

When Aziraphale started to squeeze him back, his hands warm and wide on Crowley’s shoulders, Crowley took it as a cue to hover a questioning hand over the angel’s trouser buttons.

“Do you still…?”

“Please,” Aziraphale murmured, squeezing one more time with both hands.

Crowley unbuttoned his trousers, otherwise leaving Aziraphale’s clothes alone, and drew him out. Aziraphale was half-hard in his hand and getting harder, and _oh_ Crowley didn’t want to wait. He took Aziraphale in his mouth, still somewhat soft and a little smaller than he would be later, and thrilled at the feeling of it. There was something strangely vulnerable about it, some intimacy to be found in being trusted to hold a part of Aziraphale’s body that was fragile and precious to him, and Crowley felt a fierce protectiveness rising in him.

Although the alcohol had vanished and his mind had cleared, that longing for this to be something _more_ still lurked in his mind… or maybe it was in his heart. It was hard to tell sometimes with these bodies. They felt so human sometimes, but even Crowley couldn’t name all of the pieces of himself. There were so many dark corners in there where inconvenient feelings could hide, safe from any of his attempts to burn them out.

_Sometimes it feels like the edges of you fit the edges of me,_ he thought. _Like being with you fills up the missing pieces where something was taken, that you cover over the places where I'm sharp and broken and jagged._

He felt Aziraphale grow hard in his mouth, felt the heavy weight of him on his tongue. Felt the little wiggles Aziraphale’s hips were doing under his hands, movements that probably wanted to be thrusts. Crowley changed his tactics, shifting from the slow, exploratory movements he’d used to get the angel hard to the quick, messy licks he knew from experience would drive Aziraphale wild.

“Oh, _Crowley,”_ he heard Aziraphale say above him. The way his breath hitched halfway through Crowley’s name sent a spike of arousal straight down to his own Effort.

Crowley would do anything—finish any task, take any punishment, grovel and beg, kill someone, whatever it took—if he got to hear Aziraphale say his name like that every day. If he got to go to sleep at night knowing that he’d wake up and get to hear it again tomorrow. He’d tear the stars down one by one if it meant he could stay beside his angel under that black and empty sky.

_Sometimes it feels so much like what we're doing, who we are when we're together... is right,_ he thought. _Feels so right that I can't help but believe it a little._

Aziraphale’s hands reached for him, fumbling and urgent. Crowley felt them tighten in his hair, felt the tug against his scalp and the answering heat in his belly. A low whine built in his throat, and in answer the hips beneath his hands gave a barely-restrained jerk, not enough to hurt or choke him— _Aziraphale was careful, always careful_ —but enough that the angel’s hand knocked the earpiece of his glasses askew.

Before he could stop himself, before he could remind himself what a _fucking bad idea it was,_ Crowley had already looked up and met the angel’s half-lidded gaze, his own serpentine eyes laid bare. It was too much, seeing him like this, seeing the pleasure written plainly on his face… being _seen_ by those eyes, with nothing covering his own. Aziraphale inhaled sharply, swallowed. Crowley watched as he shut his mouth, bit his lip, and the frantic pounding of Crowley’s heartbeat behind his eardrums was the loudest thing in the room. He half expected to feel the fist in his hair pull him back hard, to be shoved away, to be finally rejected. To know that _this time,_ finally, was the _last time,_ the day he’d been dreading since that first hasty fuck a quarter century ago.

He should really let go. He should try to preserve a little of his dignity, _their_ dignity. He shouldn’t force Aziraphale to push him away with his cock still in Crowley’s mouth, but he _couldn’t._ He couldn’t be the one to end this.

Aziraphale’s hold on his hair loosened. He felt the drag in his fingers along his scalp, past his ear… the angel didn’t stop looking at him, and Crowley was frozen, unable to move, until those soft fingers had finished guiding the earpiece of his glasses back into place.

Crowley’s face burned with shame. He waited just a moment, and when the rejection did not come, he wrapped his arms around the angel’s thighs and pressed them tight against either side of his head, muffling the sound of the world behind soft flesh and dense muscle. He took all of him in his mouth, felt the nudge of Aziraphale’s cock against the back of his throat as he rubbed his nose into the nest of white-blond curls at the base of him. Aziraphale cried out, his hands fluttering over Crowley’s shoulders as though he wasn’t sure what to do with them, and Crowley moved faster, flicking his tongue along the underside like he knew drove the angel wild, and it worked. He took him as deeply as he could, his lack of a gag reflex working once again in his favor. Hollowed his cheeks and swallowed around him.

_I can't help that the shape of me is wrong,_ Crowley thought. _I wish that the pieces of me fit the pieces of you, but they don’t._

He was a snake, for Hell’s sake, he could do this like no mortal or angel could dream of. If he ever stooped so low as to give any credit to Her, he would say he’d been _designed_ for this. It would be good, he could _make it good._ He could make up for his mistake.

_I'm not what you really want, definitely not what you need. But... I can try to be. At least for right now._

It was working. He could hear the angel keening, _felt_ the tension in his legs, in his belly below Crowley’s hands…

With a muffled groan, Aziraphale came down his throat. Crowley kept sucking through it, relishing the taste of him on his tongue until he felt him softening in his mouth. He pulled off with one long lick—his heart skipping at the shudder it produced—and tucked Aziraphale back inside his trousers.

They sat there for a moment, both breathing hard, before Crowley dared to look up again. Aziraphale looked completely spent, head lolling against the back of the sofa, an arm thrown over his face. His hair was a mess, like he’d put his hands through it after giving up on touching Crowley’s. At long last, he sighed and wriggled back, sitting upright as he let his eyes flutter open.

“My dear boy, that was…” he panted, and his cheeks were still flushed pink as he looked at the demon kneeling between his legs. _“Spirited.”_

A smirk was safe. A smirk was something he could offer up between them, something that felt normal, that could hide the panic that had surged through him when he thought he’d been so close to losing this… and once that had faded, the stinging in his yellow fucking eyes that the angel had covered up again.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand when he saw Aziraphale leaning towards him. Sure enough, the angel cupped Crowley’s cheeks and kissed him, long and slow.

When they parted, Crowley asked him, “Well, did it work?”

“You are incredibly distracting, you wily thing,” Aziraphale answered, his voice playfully somber in spite of the pleasure-bright gleam still in his eyes.

The angel extended a hand and helped Crowley off the ground and back up onto the sofa. For just a moment, they did nothing but sit side by side. Aziraphale was radiant, a blissful grin on his face when he looked at Crowley, breath coming in deep huffs as came down from the peak of his orgasm. The longer he looked at the demon beside him, though, the more he seemed to see something that concerned him. The more his easy smile faded into something more rigid.

“Crowley…” he finally said, and Crowley felt like his heart was trying to crawl out of his throat.

“Mmm?”

“About earlier,” Aziraphale began, putting a hand on Crowley’s knee in a way that felt uncomfortably close to pity. “It was an accident, I know, but—”

“Sorry,” Crowley interrupted. “Didn’t mean to, uh. Ruin the mood.”

Aziraphale shook his head, stroked him so gently with a thumb as if to soothe some wild creature. Crowley couldn’t stand it. “You didn’t!”

“Don’t. Please don’t—” _(lie to me)_ “Feel like you need to, uh. Be on eggshells. Around me. M’fine.”

“Crowley…” The angel cleared his throat. “I just. I don’t want you to think that… that you’re. Strange. Or, or alone in this. What I mean to say is… Well. I’ve not brought my—my wings out. Other… other, ah. Parts.”

That awful pity was growing even clearer in Aziraphale’s tone as he made his excuses. Things felt fragile, awkward. Strained. Like they were both choosing their words so very carefully, and yet, there was distance stretching between them. Yawning and deep. There always had to be distance between them, of course. There were lines they couldn’t ever cross, barriers they both had to maintain. _“Don’t show him your eyes,”_ for one, which stung more now to think about than it had the first night he thought to formalize it. _“Never let him know how much it means,”_ a thing he struggled with every time they were together, and that seemed to be getting harder the more he fell in love with him. The more it hurt to think that there were parts of him Aziraphale didn’t want to see.

“Again, I’m… I’m terribly sorry,” Aziraphale said, concluding his rambling apology.

“Angel, stop.” Crowley shook his head and sighed. “It was an accidental slip.”

“I think mostly I’m wanting to apologize for my reaction. I’m sorry for… for drawing attention. Staring. Making you worry.”

Crowley hummed. “I’ve had worse reactions. You didn’t scream, for one. Or try to stab me.”

Aziraphale sucked in a breath through his teeth. “No, Crowley. Never.”

“I know.”

“You forget, it’s—it’s been quite some time now. But I… I’ve seen them before. You used to walk the world with your eyes bare.”

_From the beginning, you’d always been able to see exactly what I was._

He shrugged. “The glasses made it a lot easier to deal with the humans. Once those were invented, there was a lot less screaming and a lot less attempted stabbing.” Then, because Crowley never could resist digging deeper when he found himself in a hole, he added, “A lot of the humans are frightened of them. Or, uh. Some of them I think were disgusted.”

Crowley watched as the angel’s face shifted from concern to outrage, his nose crinkling with the intensity of his frown. “Of all the ridiculous things to be afraid of!”

Crowley blinked. “I take it that you mean you aren’t, then?”

“Heavens, no!” Aziraphale said, huffy. “I hope you won’t take offense, my dear boy, but I haven’t been afraid of you once in all the time I’ve known you.”

“I’m terrifying, I’ll have you know,” he grumbled, purely on reaction. Even as he said it, he felt like a weight was being lifted from his shoulders.

“Naturally.”

“How about disgusted?” Crowley asked, the question pushing past his lips before he could stop it.

The angel’s answer came quickly. “No, of course not!” And then he caught himself. “Well…”

“Well?”

“Of course, I have to find your… your wicked wiles, ah. Distasteful. Evil is always, um. Repellant. To me, as an angel. But you, personally?” Aziraphale swallowed, his eyes flicking to the ceiling. He dropped his voice lower and the words, when he spoke them, sounded raw. “No. Never. Not even once.”

It was like someone had turned a light on inside Crowley’s mind, letting him see for the first time the shape of this thing that had lurked between them all these years. “Aziraphale… I. I’m curious about something.”

“Yes?”

“My eyes,” Crowley began. “They changed when I Fell. I… I don’t remember what they looked like Before. Only that they surprised me the first time I saw them, because they hadn’t been like that the last time I’d seen them.” He cleared his throat, surprised with the ease with which he was saying this. He’d never… never said any of this before out loud. “Didn’t know what to call them yet. Didn’t know what a snake was, not until the Garden. Just knew they were different. Demonic. Sulfur yellow. Thought they were… were pretty cool, though. ‘Specially when I saw the ugly mugs some of the others ended up with. See in the dark pretty well, too. That’s useful.”

Aziraphale had listened to the whole meandering story with rapt attention, his own blue eyes wide and round. When Crowley trailed off, the angel gave his knee another squeeze and said, “Go on?”

“Oh. Ah, well. When I figured out I could, y’know…” Crowley made a complicated gesture that hopefully communicated the idea of growing legs and walking about instead of slithering. “I noticed the eyes stayed the same. Tried… tried changing them a few times, just for curiosity’s sake, but they’re as good as stuck. Figured out how to shrink the irises, but that’s as far as I got. I wouldn’t have cared what else they’d look like, but it… it bothered me that I couldn’t, um. Couldn’t change them at all.”

“I… I see.”

“M’point is, there was a time when I didn’t really like looking at them…” _Either,_ he’d almost said, but he caught himself. “It was a reminder of how much they owned me. Right down to the eyes in my head.”

They were getting dangerously close to another category of conversation that he _did not talk about with Aziraphale._ Did not talk about with anyone, ever. He didn’t want the angel worrying about the specifics about what working for Hell was like. With the tiny amount he _did_ know, Aziraphale was already so risk-averse when it came to Crowley’s safety that it was almost impossible to get him to do much of anything at times for fear that Hell would hurt him in retaliation. The angel didn’t need to know that Hell never needed to have a _reason_ to hurt someone.

That thought, coupled with the reemerging look of pity on Aziraphale’s face—sharper, now, like there was some pain mixed in with it now too—made Crowley pull a sneer out of self-preservation.

“Don’t—don’t get me wrong. I don’t—I don’t _regret_ anything. I don’t mind them now, but I… they can still be a reminder when I might rather forget. Just for a bit.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t like the reminder either, sometimes. Do you?”

Aziraphale’s face lit up with understanding. “You know, I—I pretend, sometimes,” he began, quiet and tentative, “that things were different. Try to forget for a few moments how… well. You know the danger as well as I do.”

“Yeah, I… I know.”

The angel gave a weak chuckle. “Too many reminders and it’s hard to feel relaxed enough to do much of anything.”

Well, there it was. As clear as anything Aziraphale was ever willing to put to words. There was relief in knowing, and honestly, he was glad to find out it was this and not some alternative. That Aziraphale was trying to put some of the less appealing realities of their situation out of mind and not… not trying to pretend he was shagging someone who wasn’t a demon. That he wasn’t trying to put up with something that was repellant to him in some way.

“Yeah. It’s… it’s pretty fucking complicated sometimes, but we can keep this—keep what we do simple. Keep the reminders to a minimum.” Crowley stretched his shoulders, easing out some of the stiffness that had crept into them with his earlier stress. “Right. So, the glasses stay on. Anything else you’d like?”

Aziraphale balked. “I… I beg your pardon?”

“We can…” He trailed of, searching for a possible addition. “Dunno. Not talk about work stuff on nights like this. If you wanted.”

It would be a big sacrifice, because honestly, even though he was an angel, Aziraphale was the only being Crowley felt like really got what he was trying to do sometimes. But if Aziraphale liked to let himself get a bit lost in the idea that their affair had far fewer strings attached and much lower stakes, hey. Crowley wasn’t complaining. He didn’t like to dwell on it, either.

Instead, the angel looked vaguely horrified. “You… you want to stop discussing work?”

“Just… y’know. In private. We can still do planning for the Arrangement when we’re out and about. But if it’s too much of a mood killer…”

“Wait,” Aziraphale said, raising his hands. “Are you telling me it’s something _you_ don’t want, or assuming it’s something _I_ don’t want? Because if you’re only trying to spare my comfort, I’d tell you that I quite like talking about work with you. Within reasonable limits, of course.”

“Reasonable limits, yeah,” Crowley repeated, heart doing a strange little skip. “Save the paperwork until after we have concluded the evening’s sexcapades, got it.”

“Crowley, be serious.”

“Oh, deadly serious. Need to have reasonable limits or otherwise it’d end up as, _‘Crowley, dear boy, would you fetch me Form 3-B?’”_ He stuck two fingers in his mouth and spoke around them with exaggerated muffling. _“‘Juth a mo’, an’el, can qui’ reath wif your thock in m’mouf.’”_

It was a sign of how off-kilter Aziraphale seemed to be tonight that not only did Aziraphale not laugh at that, he didn’t even pretend to scold him. He just stared at Crowley, the little crease between his eyebrows suddenly unbearable.

“We don’t have to change anything if you like how it’s working,” Crowley said, keeping his voice low and soothing, even as he stealthily wiped the spit off his hand on the leg of his trousers.

“I… I do like it,” Aziraphale said, sounding rather cautious.

“I do too.”

That earned him something approximating a real smile. Crowley decided to push his luck and see if he could steer them the rest of the way out of these choppy waters that they’d found themselves in.

“Well, then. Like you said way back then in Paris, nothing has to change. We’re friends, yeah?” He waited for Aziraphale to respond, and he did, although his nod came on a delay. Like he still struggled, even after all these years, to accept the term. “We’re… we’re having fun.”

Crowley reminded himself that no matter how he felt, this couldn’t ever be more than a physical affair. Even if Aziraphale loved him, loved him in the same way Crowley loved Aziraphale—because Crowley was fairly sure Aziraphale did at least love him as a friend—he didn’t see any way for this to end that wasn’t in tragedy. There wasn’t any way out for them, owned as they were by their sides. They didn’t even have the means to defend themselves if they were caught. Not that he could ever ask Aziraphale to choose him if it came to that. Heaven would assume that choosing Crowley meant choosing Hell, and even if they didn’t kill him outright, Crowley knew what it was like to Fall. He’d Fall again and again until the sun burned out if it meant Aziraphale never had to. Aziraphale belonged in Heaven, even if none of the other angels did. The best of their bad options was staying alive and lying low, and even if it wasn’t the exact setup he daydreamed about, it still felt good to be here.

No matter what Crowley wanted, this was an extension of the Arrangement, and there were rules. The two of them needed to be balanced. It was unfair for Aziraphale to be the only one having to watch out for that. Crowley could shoulder a little discomfort if it meant they could both ignore the reality of their differences—ignore their obligations, ignore the very real threat to their safety posed by their roles—for these few hours they got to have in secret.

“So, we’ll keep on as normal, then. I can fix the other bit. Simple enough for me to make it so what happened earlier doesn’t happen again,” Crowley said, shrugging like this was the easiest thing in the world to say. In some ways, it was. “Barely counts as a miracle to make sure my glasses stay on. Could… could get a bigger pair, too.”

Aziraphale looked at him for a long moment, his lips parted. He pressed them closed, looked down at his lap where he’d pulled in his hands. Twisted his ring. Squeezed his fingers. Crowley watched his throat as he swallowed. “You shouldn’t have to… have to change something like that. Not for me.”

“Nah. Been thinking of getting a new style of glasses soon, anyway. They make these ones now that wrap around the sides.” Crowley tapped the earpieces just behind the hinges. “Very modern. Less chance of accidents.”

“Right, yes,” Aziraphale said as he looked back up, his voice unnaturally bright. “I’m sure those… I know they’ll look very dapper on you. Oh, what am I saying? Everything you wear looks dapper.”

The unexpected praise made his insides squirm even as Crowley found himself surprised by the abrupt shift in tone. “‘Course it will,” he said, speaking as though on instinct. “S’because I have good taste in clothes and am willing to keep up with the times.”

The corners of Aziraphale’s mouth twitched in amusement, and it felt as though they were settling back onto familiar ground. _“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,”_ he said. “I would wager that you find my clothes dreadfully appealing. It seems as though you often cannot keep your hands off of them.”

Crowley’s mind went blank, but his mouth kept speaking. “Well, that’s because I keep trying to take them off you, you numpty.”

Aziraphale threw his head back and laughed, loud and unselfconscious. The last of his strange unease evaporating.

“Yes, yes, well done,” Crowley grumbled, fighting back a smile. Swallowing down a sigh of relief. “You’re terribly attractive and I cannot wait to get you naked and shag you silly. I thought we’d already established this. Don’t let it get to your head.”

“Is that right?” The angel asked, looking pointedly down at his own lap where his trousers were still unbuttoned. “I notice that you left them on tonight.”

“Yes, well…” Crowley said, then drew up short. “It’s…”

“Yes?”

He narrowed his eyes—not that Aziraphale could see them, mind—and did his best bad impression of the fussy angel sitting beside him on the sofa. “Sometimes I cannot possibly wait to get you naked _before_ I shag you silly, and simply _must_ suffer through your sartorial choices.” He scrunched his nose up for effect. “I know it’s terribly complicated, but _do_ try to keep up, dear boy.”

Still laughing, Aziraphale said, “You never sound anything like me.”

“Clearly, you don’t know what you sound like.”

“Would you like to go upstairs?” Aziraphale asked, his hand creeping higher up Crowley’s thigh. “You took such good care of me tonight. I want to return the favor.”

“Mneh,” Crowley replied, clearly and succinctly. There was something in his brain telling him to worry, but it was difficult to put a name to it. His arousal, which he’d been fighting against since before he’d sobered up, was coming back to him now in full force and making it hard to think. Finally, though, he managed to cobble together a whole statement. “Not a favor.”

“Wasn’t it?”

Crowley shook his head. “Just did it because I wanted to. You don’t… you never _owe_ me. Not for this.”

It probably wasn’t really in keeping with the spirit of the Arrangement, but he never wanted to feel like this was transactional. Never wanted to feel like he was being paid back.

Thankfully, Aziraphale seemed to take his meaning, because he made a considering noise and then asked, “What if that was what I wanted, too? To make you feel good, I mean. Bring you pleasure just because I wanted to.”

“Well, that…” Crowley started, then trailed off into a creaky, wordless sound. “That would. Be different, then. I suppose.”

“I don’t feel obligated,” Aziraphale said. “And I don’t want you to feel obligated, either. If you’re too tired, we can stay right here on the settee and I can let you sleep—”

“No. I’m wide awake,” he hurried to say. It was only half true. He was fucking exhausted, both physically and mentally, and if he stayed still long enough Crowley knew that the odds of him falling asleep were decent. Crowley didn’t want to sleep, though. He didn’t want to waste another minute of this night.

“Well. If you’re interested in continuing, you’re welcome to head up to the bedroom.” Crowley was on his feet before the angel even finished his sentence. “I’ll be up shortly. I want to gather up our shoes and coats. Wouldn’t want to leave them lying about down here.”

“I don’t mind doing that.”

Aziraphale smiled at him, waved him on. “It’s alright. I’m going to check the wards again, too. Go on up. Make yourself comfortable.”

Crowley nodded and headed towards the staircase. He was halfway up, feet cold on the iron steps, when Aziraphale called after him again.

“Try to think about what you might like me to do for you once I get there.”

He felt his stomach swoop at those words. So, it was to be _that_ sort of night, then. There was something overwhelming about being the sole focus of Aziraphale’s attention, at having the angel put together and calm while he worked to take Crowley apart. After twenty-four years, he should be used to it. He wasn’t, though, and he suspected he never would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical Note:** In 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, erupted, decimating the island of Sumbawa where it was located. It also spewed a heavy volume of gasses and debris into the atmosphere that would linger there for over a year with long-term effects across the globe. There were significant effects on the weather which caused crops to fail, resulted in mass outbreaks of disease, and generally killed a ton of folks over an extended period of time. Because the cold, wet weather didn’t let up the following spring, the next year became known as The Year Without a Summer.  
> A lot of people thought it was the end of the world, and some reacted by making doomsday prophecies. There was a prediction that the sun was dying. I’m sure Crowley would have had some shit to say about that.
> 
> There were way more impacts on science, art, and culture caused by the eruption and The Year Without a Summer than I could possibly talk about before this end note starts to become even more of a thesis (Like velocipedes! Did you know those were invented around this time because it was harder to come by oats to feed horses?). I am going to talk a little bit about how it impacted literature, though, because Aziraphale would frown on me if I didn’t.  
> The cold summer of 1816 was the year that Mary Shelley and her bro squad hunkered down in the country and passed the time writing scary stories. Because of that unseasonably chilly holiday, the world was #Blessed by Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_. Lord Byron, member of the #MaryShellyBroSquad, was also inspired to write the poem _Darkness_ because of conditions after the eruption where candles had to be lit at noon in order to see.
> 
> Volcanic eruptions also often have an impact on visual art, too, particularly with the evocative sunsets they can cause (like how the colors in Munch’s _The Scream_ nearly a century later might have been influenced by Krakatoa). One example of the vivid sunsets, specifically that sulfur yellow Crowley mentioned, is [this painting](https://geekcast.josearredondoart.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/T03885_10.jpg) by William Turner. For a painting with similar vibes to the red (painted later, tho), there's [this one](https://d3d00swyhr67nd.cloudfront.net/w800h800/collection/VA/PC/VA_PC_2006AJ4642-001.jpg) by James Francis Danby.
> 
> This was the 2nd scene I ever wrote for this fic, way back in February. The Australian 2019-2020 brushfires were raging, and images like [this terrifying orange sky](https://images.wsj.net/im-141418?width=620&size=1.5) were all over social media making my little asthmatic lungs seize up in sympathy over here in Yeehawsville. Now it's September and the whole US West Coast is on fire (again). Between stories/pics from friends over there and images like [this apocalyptic UPS van](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/894/069/1f5), writing about smoke-choked skies and scarlet sunsets felt kind of horribly relevant to the present moment.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Good news? New job! :) Bad news? Brain tired, writing go real slow. :( I’ll be able to put chapter 12 (the end of the 1816 scene—from Aziraphale’s POV!) up next **Thursday, September 30th** _( ~~holy shit, it’s almost October??~~ )_ with a preview up the day before on tumblr for WIP Wednesday. Tune in next week to see if I can keep my update schedule going, or if there’ll be a switch to biweekly updates/a hiatus.
> 
> It’s this series’ anniversary! The first chapter of [Hot Days, Mad Blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20745212) went online exactly a year ago today, and _good golly Miss Molly what a year it has been._  
>  I just remembered that Carrds exist and don’t technically violate Ao3’s ToS agreement, so if you are interested in/able to celebrate this fic’s birthday with a little good deed, please consider looking at these informative links to learn about how to help out with:
> 
> [The West Coast wildfires](https://westcoastfiresdonate.carrd.co) 
[Recovery after the Australian brushfires](https://helpaustralia.carrd.co) 
[Black Lives Matter](https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co), who are still out there fighting for their lives and their rights even though a lot of the media attention has shifted away
[Trans Rights](https://transrightshumanrights.carrd.co), because being angry at TERFs (even ones who use their large platforms to advertise their new books with inflammatory bigotry) is only part of supporting trans folks.

> 
> Casual reminder that Salvation Army is a fucking hate group.
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me through this massive series, y’all, as well as through this massive end note. XD


	12. Selfish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It seemed too impossible a thing to be real, sometimes, to think that he was really the object of such consideration. He occasionally found himself waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under him. To be shown that he’d misunderstood, and that it was all a test or a joke he hadn’t realized was being told. That had been a familiar feeling, once, until he learned to anticipate that _everything_ Upstairs was a potential test and every joke was likely at his expense. These days it hardly bothered him to be proved right.
> 
> But the moment never came. Not here, not on Earth. Not with Crowley. When the demon paid attention to the things Aziraphale cared about, it had never felt like scrutiny, never felt like he was looking for a weakness to exploit. Even when Crowley teased him for his eccentricities, Aziraphale never got the feeling that Crowley really minded them or wanted him to change. It all felt wholly genuine, and sometimes that scared him. Other times, like tonight, Aziraphale was happy simply to bask in the feeling of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song rec for the chapter, anyone? [_Keep Me in Your Heart For a While_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMhpkQxtZs&list=RDzWLoKAXJPjQ&index=38) by the Wailin’ Jennys. I like the way this one contrasts with last chapter’s _Two_ by Sleeping At Last that I put up for Crowley’s perspective of the scene.
> 
> **Content Notes:** Hi, there’s _so much_ self-hatred, anxiety, guilt, paranoia, and doublethink in this one. Blanket warning for Aziraphale being real fucked up by Heaven.  
> Fear and guilt around the (mistaken) belief on Aziraphale’s part that he crossed Crowley’s boundaries. This is a bit similar to the misunderstanding about Crowley’s tongue in chapter 7, but it is discussed in greater detail here.  
> A panic attack that is redirected and avoided.  
> Themes of feeling alienated from one’s own body.  
> Having sex for some maybe not altogether fully healthy reasons. “If the sex is great, maybe he won’t notice that I suck” type reasons. Everyone’s into it, but there’s some Background Distress, too. That said, Aziraphale is severely stuck in his own head here, and having a sexy distraction does help.  
> Corporational Plasticity, AKA a bullshit term I just made up to describe some creative flexibility in the Efforts department. See the sex acts list for more detail.  
> As Aziraphale doesn’t actually know much about Crowley’s sexual history, there’s super vague, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speculation about whether Crowley had ever been hurt by a past partner.
> 
> Specific sex acts: Hand jobs, oral sex, multiple orgasms, marathon sex. (Technically, the multiple O’s and marathon sex are spread out over both this chapter and the next, but as that’s the vibe of the whole scene I opted to list those acts starting here.)  
> I wanted to make a joke about Aziraphale wearing the Service Top Hat in this chapter, but that just sent me on a long introspective journey thinkin’ about how top/bottom labels apply to something like a beej (if they apply at all) and whether I even find those terms personally useful while writing. Basically, just know that Aziraphale is tripping over himself to make Crowley feel good. He’s also having a lot of monsterfucker fantasies, but those are staying in his imagination (for now).  
> Let’s talk Efforts! Aziraphale is keeping the same penis he had in the last chapter. Crowley, on the other hand, has opted to give himself two fully functional sets of genitals. He is working with both a penis and a vulva here, and Aziraphale thinks that’s just _spiffing._

Aziraphale listened to the sound of Crowley’s quiet footsteps as he disappeared up the staircase, waited until he heard his bedroom door open and then shut. When he thought he was sure the demon had truly left—giving a short pause in case he doubled back—Aziraphale let out a long exhale and leaned forward where he sat, resting his head on his knees. Shame and relief coiled inside him in equal measure.

Crowley seemed… happy, at least. Happy as he could be, under the circumstances. And Aziraphale should be, too. He’d gotten the answer to a question he’d been asking for decades, even though he’d tried for years to keep that line of thinking subdued.

Before tonight, Aziraphale hadn’t ever actually _known_ why Crowley wanted to keep his eyes covered. He’d wanted to know, of course, and he even had a few theories. It was a relief to know Crowley didn’t seem to be hiding them out of fear or discomfort, at least. He’d wondered about that. There were humans, too, that Aziraphale knew were uncomfortable with eye contact. Some that found it distressing when forced to practice it. He did not know if Crowley’s situation was similar—the demon used to go about the world with his eyes uncovered, used to make eye contact with Aziraphale regularly. But he’d started to wonder if perhaps that had been for a lack of better options. Before he knew he could ask Aziraphale not to look.

Regardless of how much he wanted to know, he’d never wanted to _ask._ Aziraphale was of the opinion that one should not interrogate a partner’s boundaries. His greatest fear had always been, ever since the first time they’d made love, that Crowley would think he was trying to find a way around them and let them drop. That Crowley would give up his own comfort to please Aziraphale.

A small, cruel voice in his mind asked, _Wasn’t that what you did anyway?_

Made him feel like he had to explain himself. Made him divulge private information, something that Aziraphale doubted Crowley had ever shared before. All to ease Aziraphale’s own guilty conscience. To provide _Aziraphale_ comfort when Crowley was the one who had been hurt.

_Yes, well done, Aziraphale,_ the voice said. _Are you incapable of going one visit without hurting him?_

He’d been too hasty. Too greedy. Lost himself in the selfish chase for pleasure and had once again forgotten the one _singular_ boundary Crowley had ever really established and enforced about his body. For twenty-four years, Crowley had been an eager and adventurous lover, excited to try anything and everything Aziraphale ever suggested they do. The only caveat had been that Aziraphale let him keep his eyes covered. For twenty-four years, Crowley had been consistently courteous about Aziraphale’s comfort and consent, and Aziraphale had been too clumsy and covetous to do the same. He’d tried to fix it, but that seemed to only make things worse.

_Of course it did,_ said that voice again. _You stared at the poor thing, just like you always do. Made it so much worse than it had to be._

He’d seen Crowley’s eyes many times other times before tonight, of course. There were times when his glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose, or when he turned his head in profile, that Aziraphale had been able to catch a peek of those golden eyes. He hoarded every glimpse like the treasure it was, and every time felt guilty that he had looked without permission. Aziraphale, always on the lookout for loopholes, told himself that it only seemed to bother Crowley when he _knew_ Aziraphale had seen them, and so by not mentioning all those tiny moments, Aziraphale was sparing him discomfort. That, too, made him guilty because he couldn’t lie to himself well enough to pretend his motivations were actually that selfless. The thing he _should_ do was look away, but he couldn’t. Without fail, every time Crowley forgot himself and looked at Aziraphale over the tops of his glasses, Aziraphale couldn’t help himself but look back, if only for a heartbeat.

And now, because of how he’d acted tonight, he’d probably never get another glimpse of them again. He’d pushed Crowley into taking matters into his own hands—getting new glasses, expending miracles to keep them in place—all because Aziraphale couldn’t control himself.

Aziraphale was less considerate of boundaries than a demon was. What did that say about him?

Crowley, though Aziraphale would never say it out loud for fear of offending the demon, could be selfless to a fault... at least when it came to Aziraphale himself. Aziraphale wondered on occasion if the reason Crowley was so good to him was because there was no one else it was safe for him to be kind to, not without risking punishment. He knew his friendship with the demon—their _relationship,_ secret though it was—often provided him with an outlet for his less angelic tendencies. Things he couldn’t do anywhere else. In front of anyone else. Perhaps it worked the same way in reverse.

But regardless of _why_ Crowley acted this way, he’d been doing it for twenty-four years. Longer, if Aziraphale was being honest with himself. Even just in terms of the sex, though, Crowley almost always let Aziraphale steer their encounters. Let him pick how often they met, what they did, and in what configuration. From the very beginning, he’d let Aziraphale set the pace as he ventured into the world of partnered sexuality for the first time. It was a kindness, yes, and a gentleness, but Aziraphale’s suspected that it might also be a further extension of the demon's adorably persistent desire to spoil Aziraphale with gifts and attention and favors. To... make him happy.

It seemed too impossible a thing to be real, sometimes, to think that he was really the object of such consideration. He occasionally found himself waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under him. To be shown that he’d misunderstood, and that it was all a test or a joke he hadn’t realized was being told. That had been a familiar feeling, once, until he learned to anticipate that _everything_ Upstairs was a potential test and every joke was likely at his expense. These days it hardly bothered him to be proved right.

But the moment never came. Not here, not on Earth. Not with Crowley. When the demon paid attention to the things Aziraphale cared about, it had never felt like scrutiny, never felt like he was looking for a weakness to exploit. Even when Crowley teased him for his eccentricities, Aziraphale never got the feeling that Crowley really minded them or wanted him to change. It all felt wholly genuine, and sometimes that scared him. Other times, like tonight, Aziraphale was happy simply to bask in the feeling of it.

Aziraphale often felt as though he had very little say over what happened in the rest of his life—perhaps this was another of Crowley’s unmentionable kindnesses, giving Aziraphale choices when he otherwise had so few.

Sometimes, when he was alone—always alone, never when they were together, and often after he’d returned from a check-in Upstairs—Aziraphale remembered that choices were what Crowley offered all the people he tempted. He never pushed or cajoled or threatened. Just… found out what a person wanted, and then let them damn themselves.

Aziraphale was rational enough to realize that such thoughts were likely paranoia and nothing more. It had been centuries since he’d last seriously considered the idea that Crowley might only be acting nice to him as a part of some scheme. Crowley had long since proven himself a decent fellow—more than decent—and a dear friend. A demon, too, yes, but only by profession. Aziraphale could hardly hold what he did for work against him, especially not when he was off the clock. Not when they were both off the clock. And that was how Aziraphale had come to think of their time together.

It made him feel so much better to know Crowley understood, that he felt the same way. That he desired time together without _reminders._ They’d never be anything else but what they were, an angel and a demon, but at night when things were quiet, when there was nothing expected of them… sometimes they could be people, too. Aziraphale and Crowley. Aziraphale-and-Crowley, maybe. Even if that part wasn’t said quite so loudly.

Now that he knew what the issue was, Aziraphale could do better. He could be a good lover, be mindful of Crowley's needs and wants like Crowley was of his. He could be mindful even when Crowley seemed to forget about himself for Aziraphale's comfort and pleasure. Aziraphale appreciated the kindness for what it was, but he had to be better about letting it be so one-sided. Crowley shouldn't be expected to do it all himself, and even though the demon seemed determined to let Aziraphale lead, Aziraphale could do the same for him sometimes. Give instead of always taking. Guard Crowley like he was meant to guard Eden, and this time, do it right.

He just needed Crowley to tell him what he wanted. The demon was getting better about it, but he sometimes seemed shy about asking for things for himself. There was another, more obvious answer for why Crowley always let Aziraphale steer, why he was so cautious and careful around him. It was clear that Crowley was concerned about hurting him. It was a kindness, and it was admirable—especially for a being like Crowley who surely must see so much harm every day in his working life, a being who might otherwise have grown numb to it—but it was an unnecessary precaution. Aziraphale wasn’t a particularly good angel, but he had been formed to fulfil a specific purpose. A reluctant soldier was still a soldier, and even without his sword Aziraphale couldn’t ever really be considered unarmed. He was a being built to deal out and withstand damage, and he doubted that there was much Crowley could do unintentionally that could actually injure him.

Aziraphale, in contrast, knew it was possible for him to hurt Crowley quite badly without meaning to. They’d scrapped before in the past, sometimes for show and other times because they’d been feeling pent up and bored and needed to expend the energy somehow, but hadn’t yet discovered how much better sex was for that than a wrestling match in the dust. He knew firsthand that Crowley was fast and clever, yet clearly untrained in combat. Stronger than the average human, of course, but no match for a Principality. Aziraphale had tried to teach him some of the basics once, excusing it away by saying he wanted their little tussles to have the appearance of fairness. What he’d really been hoping for, though, was to teach Crowley how to keep himself from getting hurt if he ever found himself in a real fight. How to spot attacks before they came. How to dodge. How to stay out of reach of an opponent who was stronger and more skilled and determined to cut him down.

He’d never asked what purpose Crowley had been given when he was first created. What he’d done Before. Crowley hadn’t ever brought it up, and it seemed like a horribly invasive and potentially painful question to bother a demon with unprompted. It hadn’t been anything combat-oriented, of that Aziraphale was certain. Possibly one of the creative departments, if he had to guess—animals, maybe, or perhaps plants. The one thing he _did_ know about Crowley’s time up in Heaven was that he hadn’t been on the front lines during the War. Crowley had told him as much after Aziraphale had selfishly asked him, trying to assuage his own guilt. Aziraphale’s own wound from that battle still ached whenever he left his corporation, and he sometimes wondered how many of the Fallen still felt pain from injuries dealt by Aziraphale’s own long-lost sword. He used to wonder if Crowley had been one of that number, but Crowley assured him that he’d hidden instead of fighting.

Perhaps the trick would work a second time.

Aziraphale ran a hand through his hair, breathing deep and slow to try to trick his sometimes too-human corporation out of what felt like a building panic attack. These human bodies were such fiddly things, even his own that wasn’t really human at all. Living in one could be terribly confusing at times. Aziraphale occasionally wondered if he’d been given a defective corporation by mistake, or if it was breaking down after nearly six thousand years of service. Of course, it probably wasn’t the corporation at all that was the problem.

Thoughts like those weren’t going to get him calm, though, and he needed to be calm. When he was calm, Aziraphale could plan and focus and protect. It was when he let fear rule him that he made mistakes. He learned that lesson in the shadow of Eden’s wall itself, the last time he’d ever heard Her voice. Look what panic got him. He’d panicked in Paris, and _true,_ that had also gotten Crowley back in his life, but it almost got them both in a great deal of trouble. Tonight, he’d been panicking—this _year_ he’d been panicking—and he’d said so many things he shouldn’t. He let himself get sloppy, and he could have broken Crowley’s trust.

But perhaps it would be alright. He knew he shouldn’t lean on a demon’s capacity for forgiveness, even though Crowley’s felt seemingly _limitless_ given how many times Aziraphale had been welcomed back after being positively beastly to him in the past. He wanted to, though. He wanted to hope that they would be able to continue on after this, that Crowley wouldn't think him a bad partner for his slip tonight.

Aziraphale rose from the sofa, a little unsteady but aware that moving around would help more than sitting and fretting would. He paced the perimeter of the bookshop, the bare boards cold beneath his feet in the places where there were no rugs. He should really get more rugs.

Touching the spines of the books was grounding, as was breathing deeply and focusing on the lingering smells of paper and ink that permeated the shop. Leather and lanolin. Dust. Woodsmoke from the hearth upstairs. The open, near-empty bottle of whiskey on the desk. As if the bookshop itself could tell Aziraphale needed something stronger to focus on, the smells seemed to intensify, stopping just short of when they might otherwise become sickening. It likely actually was the bookshop doing it, now that he thought about it. It was a dear, clever thing, and Aziraphale could tell it had grown rather protective of the angel that had been living inside it for the last sixteen years.

On his next pass around the shop floor, Aziraphale put a hand on every window and door, checking to make sure they were locked both in the physical sense and by miracle. He could feel the frost through the glass, could feel the draft under the door to the alleyway. Hear the rain on the pavement and against the little roof overhanging the threshold. It must be positively miserable outside.

It had been needlessly risky, he knew, to have invited Crowley over quite so frequently on this visit of his to London. All this time, they’d been so good about following the time-tested patterns of the Arrangement. Acting in public places like they didn’t know each other. Keeping their trysts in the bookshop infrequent. Making sure Crowley had an escape route free that could take him out of here unseen by human eyes. Destroying all evidence of their communications.

But this year… it had him so on edge. Worn down from work, reading his books of prophecy in his off-time and seeing patterns everywhere. He’d even asked Gabriel the last time he’d been Upstairs, and gotten a terrifying yet completely unhelpful answer.

_“The exact date is confidential, Aziraphale. You know that,”_ the Archangel had said, his smile more like a grimace. _“But I can tell you we’re in the home stretch. The Antichrist could be born next year, or next century, so we all have to be on our A-game. Keep an eye on what Downstairs is plotting.”_

And then the winter had just stretched on and on, so bitter and cold with no respite from spring. Aziraphale thought often, when they were apart, of what it had felt like to have stumbled upon Crowley half-discorporated in the snow. Unresponsive, sleeping the sleep of the frozen. Scales like ice.

The moment Aziraphale had heard Crowley was in London again, he couldn’t help himself but find excuse after excuse to have the demon over. It wasn’t safe to meet up this often. It wasn’t wise. But it made Aziraphale feel just a touch better to see Crowley here in his home. To know that he was here, warm by the fire or bundled up under a stack of quilts, rather than outside somewhere. Lurking somewhere dreadful in the rain on some business for Hell and chilled to the bone.

On his third trip around the shop, Aziraphale reached out with his senses to feel the magic woven around the building, looking for any gaps and thankfully finding none. He pushed a bit of extra power into the wards to ensure that any human who decided to try to stop by after-hours would be redirected. Extended the distance on the alarms to ensure that if anything _inhuman_ got within five square blocks of the shop, they’d be warned. It wouldn’t last forever, but hopefully it would be enough to let them both relax some during the time they had here together tonight. For his own peace of mind, he even put a hand on the wooden arch just inside the front door and quietly asked the shop itself to keep a lookout, too.

Crowley had looked so tired when he arrived, like he had been a breath away from falling asleep on his feet at any moment. Had done, actually. He’d fallen asleep on Aziraphale’s lap on the settee and Aziraphale hadn’t even noticed until he’d spoken and woken the poor dear up. He shouldn’t have said anything. Useless words, really. Dithering. He’d have done Crowley so much more good if he’d just let him pass the night somewhere safe and warm rather than making him have to listen to Aziraphale’s pointless worrying.

He’d been unable to stop himself from saying all of his fears out loud. And of course, Crowley had done so much to try to soothe him. Even now, even as his eyes stung and his breath caught, Aziraphale recognized that there were parts of his corporation that still felt _fantastic_ where his lover had massaged him. It surprised him every single time, this three-step dance of attention, validation, and comfort that Crowley had mastered over the centuries. He _noticed_ when Aziraphale was upset, which felt like a miracle unto itself. He didn’t try to tell him he was overreacting, or misunderstanding. Didn’t tell him it was too small. Crowley just listened, and asked questions, and always did something to try to pull him out of it. A joke, a story. A distraction. Even when there were things neither of them could talk about, Crowley found some way to make everything feel a touch less dire.

It filled him with the mad urge to throw himself down at the demon’s feet and beg him to never leave again. To share the bookshop—Aziraphale’s home—with him for as long as they had. At the same time, it filled him with a powerful sense of grief.

Up on the roof, Aziraphale had been reminded so pointedly of how their story would end. He had looked across at Crowley, seen his sharp features bathed in the dim crimson light of that unnatural sunset, the deep shadows cast on his face, and Aziraphale hadn’t been able to stop himself from crying. It made him think of the future that he knew would come to pass. Made him wonder if what he was seeing was some cruel preview of the end of the world, of that last great battle on the fields of Megiddo beneath a red and burning sky.

_Is this how Crowley would look?_ Aziraphale couldn’t help himself but ask. _Is this how he’ll look the last time I get to see him alive?_

There was a noise upstairs, like a piece of furniture shifting on the floorboards, and Aziraphale practically jumped out of his skin. A quick check told him that it was still only Crowley with him in the shop… and Aziraphale had left him alone up there. For ten minutes, he observed with a look at his pocket watch. He was being a terrible host.

He wanted—no, he _needed_ to try to make this right somehow. Needed to show Crowley he was safe here, and appreciated. Cared for. Needed to prove that he was worth the time and care Crowley invested in him. To prove that he was worth the risk. Prove that Aziraphale could be the kind of lover who could be selfless.

Crowley was waiting on him, and Aziraphale needed to pull himself together. He shook his head as if to shake the thoughts and worries out, then tugged a handkerchief from his pocket to take care of his eyes and nose. They still felt like they were burning, so he spent a quick miracle to hide the evidence more thoroughly, because he _knew_ Crowley would pick up on the fact that he’d been crying.

He retreated back to his desk to put away the bottle. Gathered up their wayward socks and shoes. Folded their coats over his arm. Tucked Crowley’s scarf, along with a spare pair of mittens from his desk drawer, into a pocket.

When he was satisfied that he’d done everything he could, and had convinced himself that doing anything else would only be stalling for time, Aziraphale headed upstairs. When he reached the landing, though, he thought of one more thing to tweak. It wasn’t so much a miracle as it was a request, and the bookshop warmed itself by a couple of degrees when it heard his whispered question. It didn’t like to see Crowley shiver any more than Aziraphale did.

Out of some reflexive sense of propriety, Aziraphale knocked on the bedroom door. The voice that answered him was muffled, but sounded amused.

“Why are you knocking on your own door?”

Aziraphale blinked, then felt a smile start up at the corners of his lips. “I didn’t know if you were undressing, dear.”

“Really, now? I thought that’s why I was sent up here. To disrobe and await further angelic ravishment.”

Despite the exhaustion and panic still threading through his weary mind, affection flickered in his belly like a candle at a drafty window. Small and weak, yes, but persistent. A spot of brightness and warmth in the night.

“I didn’t want to burst in unannounced.”

There was an exasperated sigh that did very little to hide the fondness in Crowley’s voice. “Aziraphale, you live here. This is your bedroom. You don’t have to knock, just… just come inside already.”

Aziraphale slipped inside and locked the door behind him, keeping his eyes trained to the ceiling out of some half-serious defense of Crowley’s modesty. The hatch up to the roof, he noticed, had already sunk back into nonexistence. He emptied his hands, hanging their coats on the hook on the back of the door and arranging both pairs of shoes on the floor near the hearth. It knew to keep them free of ash and warm for Crowley’s inevitable departure at the end of the night.

When he turned back around, he didn’t spot the demon right away. Then, Crowley leaned forward in his seat—the armchair in the corner, behind the bookshelf. Still every bit as clothed as he'd been downstairs, Aziraphale noticed.

“Hey.”

“Hello, dear.” Aziraphale infused the words with as much cheer as he could muster. Crowley didn’t deserve any further stress tonight.

Besides, there was a lot to be happy about. Seeing Crowley sitting in his armchair like that made Aziraphale so strangely pleased. In putting it there, so close to the bed, he’d been indulging in some sad fantasy of reading in it while Crowley slept. Close enough to be at hand if he needed anything, close enough to watch over him, while at the same time not crowding him. Of course, it had been a silly notion. Crowley never stayed the night. Never past dawn, anyway. Even on these nights that were so unseasonably cold.

The chair, of course, was a comfortable place to pass the night in other ways besides reading. He was curious to find out what Crowley had in mind when he chose that place to wait.

He rolled his sleeves up to his elbows as he crossed the room. It wasn’t strictly necessary, he supposed, as he suspected he’d be undressing the rest of the way soon enough. He’d have to be terribly unobservant indeed, though, to fail to notice the way Crowley’s breath caught in anticipation when Aziraphale bared himself piece by piece. Tonight was no exception. He saw the way Crowley watched him, the way his tongue peeked out of his mouth to wet his lips. It wasn’t forked—not yet, at least—but he thought he might have seen a notch forming at the end of it.

It felt good to be wanted.

“I find I must beg your pardon for taking so long,” Aziraphale said. “I had… a spot of bother with the wards, but it is taken care of now.”

“Worth the wait,” Crowley answered, voice like honey without a trace of sarcasm.

Aziraphale could barely stand how fond he was of this incredible creature. He would be lost without him. Ten minutes downstairs on his own, and he’d worked himself into a panic. Ten seconds up here with Crowley, and he felt his fears melting away like the frost in spring. A normal spring, anyway.

He sank to his knees on the rug in that narrow space between the edge of the bed and the chair and kissed his lover slow and deep. Worked his hands inside the open collar of Crowley’s shirt, settled them on the demon’s bony shoulders and rubbed his thumbs against the sides of his neck. When they parted, they were both out of breath.

“Now, I believe we discussed the idea that you might be amenable to further forays into sexual intercourse.”

Aziraphale knew he didn't _have_ to say it like that, but even after a quarter century, the scowls Crowley gave him when he did were still well worth it.

“S'like fucking a thesaurus. No, no. S'like fucking the bastard progeny of a thesaurus that fucked a young ladies’ etiquette guide.”

“I've never gotten any complaints about how I fuck you before,” Aziraphale said, eyebrow raising. “And I seem to remember your _fervent_ praise, on more than one occasion, of the way I talk to you while I fuck you.”

Crowley sank a bit lower in the armchair, letting out some grumbling noise that was half a whine. It eventually worked its way around to intelligibility and became a somewhat petulant, _“Angel.”_

He’d learned by now that presenting Crowley with too many options right at the start could overwhelm him. Instead of asking the demon to pick a direction, to choose one type of sex out of the many they had both tried together, he asked a question that he assumed would have a more straightforward answer.

“What Effort are you wearing tonight, my dear?” Aziraphale kissed his lover’s forehead. “What have you given me to work with?

Crowley huffed out a quick laugh. “That's the thing,” he said. “I was sitting here, waiting on you to head back up, and I couldn't decide what I wanted. Then I realized that I didn't have to decide.”

“What do you mean?”

“Want me to show you?”

“Oh, yes, my dear. Very much.”

The demon lifted the untucked hem of his dark linen shirt up like a stage curtain, revealing where he’d unfastened his trousers. The idea of Crowley sitting up here alone and touching himself in this chair, in the same spot where Aziraphale liked to go to do the same, fanned that candleflame spark in Aziraphale’s belly into a proper fire. He watched Crowley tug at his trousers, shimmying in his seat as he pushed them down by inches. Watched him use the tips of his long fingers to guide a rosy cockhead free of his clothing.

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, barely louder than a sigh. “It’s a beautiful Effort.”

Crowley smiled again, sharp and flirtatious. “There’s more than that. Mind helping me get these trousers off?”

_More?_

Aziraphale felt his heart pick up in anticipation. He lifted Crowley’s legs up off the floor, helped slide the trousers over his feet. Folded them over the arm of the chair. Half dressed like this, wearing only his shirt and that wine-red waistcoat cinched so tightly around his torso that Aziraphale could watch it shift with each breath, Crowley seemed so much more naked than he might have been if he was bare from toe to tip.

When he had been moving Crowley’s legs around, Aziraphale thought he had seen a flash of something between them, but the moment had been over too quickly to really tell what it had been. Crowley waited until he knew he had Aziraphale’s full attention, then gave his cock another light stroke. It was more than half-hard now and filling quickly, and as Crowley parted his knees, Aziraphale saw the glistening folds of a quim opening beneath its base.

“Gorgeous, clever thing,” he breathed, watching Crowley's face as he brought a hand up to lightly pet at the demon's mons.

Though he knew that there were humans with similar configurations, it would never have occurred to Aziraphale before being shown tonight that having a quim and a cock at the same time was something he could do.

It was a… well, calling it a _blessing_ seemed a bit too close to blasphemy for comfort, not to mention rude to Crowley… But it did at least feel like a stroke of luck to have a partner who felt confident enough to try new things and experiment. A partner who knew his own body well enough that he could change it to suit his will, who knew which forms pleased him and knew how to adapt himself to chase that pleasure. Aziraphale wasn't sure how much of that confidence came from experience and how much was Crowley's own natural self-assuredness and bravery.

“How should I touch you?” Aziraphale asked. “What would feel good for you right now?”

He stroked a thumb down the side of Crowley’s Effort, close to both his cock and quim without actually touching either one. Crowley arched up into his touch, hips canting like he was trying to nudge Aziraphale’s hand somewhere more stimulating.

Crowley opened his mouth as if to speak, but it took a moment for words to appear. “Surprise me?”

“I… Crowley, I want this to be something you like, something that you’re interested in.”

“Anything you like, I'm interested in,” Crowley said simply. Handing over control of the encounter just like that, like it wasn’t a hard decision. Trusting Aziraphale with his body without pause, without thought.

Aziraphale wanted desperately in that moment to someday be able to give Crowley the reverse and know that he'd accept it. That he'd want such a thing. To let Crowley see that Aziraphale trusted him to take them both anywhere the demon wanted, that he didn’t have to be afraid of causing pain because the only real pain would be for Aziraphale to lose him from his life.

There would be time for such things later, he hoped, and time in between to plan the specifics. It could be a project for their next interim apart, perhaps, a way to spend those empty evenings after Crowley would invariably be pulled away again. Tonight, though…

“Would you like me to start with one in particular?” Aziraphale asked, scratching gently at the thatch of wiry hair above the root of his demon’s cock. Crowley slid his bottom a bit closer to the edge of the chair. “Or would you like me to touch both at once?”

Crowley let out a faint whine, his hand creeping up to his mouth. “Deal—dealer’s choice,” he managed to say. “Know it’ll all feel good.”

He saw his own smile reflected in the dark lenses of Crowley’s glasses, and he was proud of himself for not letting it falter. “How do you feel about fingers tonight?”

“Find myself partial to them,” Crowley answered, his returned smile toothy and fond at the familiar question. “Yours in particular.”

For as long as Aziraphale had been asking him that, Crowley had answered positively every time except once. Because of that one time, Aziraphale had resolved to keep asking it.

The demon acted like he was beyond such silly things as boundaries and getting hurt, but he knew Crowley was more vulnerable than he liked to pretend to be. Aziraphale understood, though Crowley was understandably reluctant to discuss it in any detail, that a demon’s lot in life tended to be poor in gentleness and rich in cruelty—not only in how they were expected to interact with the world, but in how the world (and Hell) interacted with them in return.

He had no knowledge of how Crowley’s past lovers had treated him, and would never presume to ask unless Crowley brought it up himself, but he had prayed more than once that they had all been kind. Now that Aziraphale had been granted that honor, he dreaded the idea that he himself might be another source of pain. Crowley deserved to be touched with love. Only with love. More than anything, Aziraphale wanted to be able to make Crowley feel safe and cared for, for however long they had before the End made such things impossible.

“Let’s work up to that, shall we?” Aziraphale leaned up and stole a kiss from Crowley’s lips—the last one for a while, he assumed, as Aziraphale planned for his mouth to be quite busy in the coming hours. “Get comfortable, dear. Try to let yourself rest a bit. You seemed so tired earlier.”

Crowley gave a fake yawn—sharpened teeth gleaming in his mouth—and shifted lower still in his seat, resting his head on the back of the armchair. He draped his body in the chair as though he were sleeping, and past the side of his glasses Aziraphale could see that his eyes were even closed. However, Aziraphale could also see the humor hidden in the line of his mouth and the carefully controlled excitement revealed in the unnatural stillness of his body. He wasn’t even breathing.

Aziraphale leaned forward, exhaling a huff of heated breath over the demon’s mons, his thumbs gently tugging his labia apart but making no move to touch him anywhere that would satisfy. He heard Crowley’s hissing inhale, felt him squirm under his hands, abandoning his joke without thought.

He started off with light, roving touches. Kisses and brushes of his lips and tongue all over his demon's Efforts and thighs, no more heated than ones he might press against Crowley's hairline while lying on the sofa together. They still likely had several hours before Crowley would make his excuses to leave at dawn, and Aziraphale wanted to spend as much of that time as possible speaking his wordless affections into Crowley's skin. Hoping his body would hear them and understand what he meant, all those things he couldn't put voice to.

Although he didn’t have the natural aptitude for this that Crowley did, Aziraphale did have practice and enthusiasm on his side. Aziraphale’s tongue remained fixed and humanoid as it traced the soft outer labia and the gentle scrape of curly copper-bright hair, as it lapped at the base of the firm, hot shaft of his lover’s cock. Crowley had always been the more skilled between the two of them when it came to altering his form, shifting the attributes of his human shape with apparently the same ease he experienced when folding himself into the shape of a serpent. With such ease he could do it quite on accident, even.

The way Crowley inhabited his corporation was fascinating to Aziraphale, the way he could make it be whatever he wanted it to be. He could even blend both forms together at will, picking whatever features pleased him most in the moment. His clever tongue, those enchanting eyes, those glossy scales… and from what Crowley had let on about how vicious the other demons could be, Aziraphale found himself grateful that he had access to fangs and claws when he needed them, too.

In contrast, Aziraphale’s relationship with his own corporation was less fluid, less intentional. It wasn’t so much that he was controlling it as he was teaching it patterns and trusting that it would go on to carry those out without his direct attention. He’d taught it breathing, blinking, and eating, which meant that it also learned hunger. Taught his heart to pump blood, his liver to recognize alcohol as a treat instead of a poison. Taught his hair to grow fast enough that he could enjoy a visit to the barber now and again, but not so fast that it became a nuisance. Taught himself to translate some of the burning need he felt for Crowley into physical desire, all that love into sensation and friction and release. In the beginning, that had been enough to tide him over.

It wasn’t that Aziraphale _couldn’t_ change himself as much as it was that he rarely remembered that it was an option. He would live in it a certain way for a few years and get used to the settings. Still, he thought he had a good handle on some of the minor changes. Switching up his Effort wasn’t terribly complicated, and neither was changing to a different gender presentation if the situation called for it. Healing himself, at least of simple wounds, was also fairly routine. Most of the time, though, he was content to merely live within his corporation, to allow it to change gradually in some places—a few more wrinkles at the corners of his eyes every few centuries, a new stretch mark where he had taken on a bit more padding—and stay forever fixed in others.

Aziraphale didn’t dislike his corporation. On the contrary, he tended to like it too much. There were moments when he felt so comfortable in it that he actually forgot his corporation wasn’t _him,_ forgot how much _more_ to him there was than these four limbs and the familiar face that looked back at him in the washroom mirror. Other times, when he remembered that he was supposed to be above all of that, above such frivolous attachment, his corporation felt a bit like a half-dry clay pot. Too malleable to be strong, yet too stiff to be remade into something better. It could so easily start to feel too small, too confining, and he’d worry that he might tear it apart at the seams from the inside. Heaven, too, had the capacity to make Aziraphale feel exactly the opposite sensation, which was similarly distressing. The feeling that Aziraphale himself was what was too small, like he was trying to walk around in a suit of armor made for a giant.

Crowley, clever, wily, creative Crowley, seemed to have adapted to his body so perfectly. Even the parts he’d admitted to struggling with he had embraced and made his own. He’d said again and again that walking didn’t come naturally to him as a creature that frequently did not have legs, but _good Heavens,_ what a walk it was. He expressed embarrassment when his tongue got away from him, but Aziraphale could live for another hundred thousand years and would never find a reason to complain about it. Even his sensitivity to temperature seemed to come with a positive, as basking in the sun had been the first pleasure Crowley had discovered on Earth and was apparently still ranked highly along with things like alcohol, sleep, and sex.

During the past quarter century, Aziraphale had gradually come to realize that being with Crowley often made him feel more in touch with his own body as well. When Crowley’s hands were on him, steady and sure, when he could hear Crowley’s voice murmuring praise and appreciation into the softest parts of him, Aziraphale never felt half-finished. He felt like he was in harmony with his physical form, fitting inside himself like a hand in a glove. Like a sword in a sheath. He thrilled at each touch, greedy for the feeling of pleasure racing through his nerves— _his_ nerves, not some remote part that belonged to his corporation. _His_ pleasure, a gift he’d been given and would be allowed to keep until it faded. And then forever after that in his memories.

Eager to return that feeling if he could, Aziraphale stroked Crowley’s cock with miraculously slick fingers as he kissed and licked at his cunt. There was a low noise vibrating somewhere in Crowley’s throat as he rocked his hips, seeking contact and friction.

“You are,” he murmured, punctuating his words with kisses. “Such a handsome fellow. So finely made. So beautiful.”

Crowley’s feet were over Aziraphale’s shoulders, his thighs propped up and open on the armrests. Aziraphale crawled closer on his knees, pressing his chest up against the edge of the seat as Crowley encircled him with his legs, pulling him inwards. The scales on his soles gently rasped at the back of Aziraphale’s waistcoat, and Aziraphale’s thoughts drifted to the deeply pleasurable foot massage Crowley had given him downstairs. Would Crowley like the same kind of thing someday? The spread of the scales seemed to be relatively involuntary, so should Aziraphale consider those another _reminder_ and not draw attention to them? Crowley did keep his stockings on sometimes, but in general his feet and the scales weren’t things that he always covered up. It seemed like the best course would be for Aziraphale to follow Crowley’s lead and lavish his attentions only on those places the demon chose to bare.

There had been many moments since the start of their physical relationship when Aziraphale had struggled to understand why Crowley seemed less comfortable with his eyes being seen than he did with some of his other snakelike features. His tongue and fangs, as an example. His claws. Those scales that liked to sprout up on his feet and lower back, and sometimes on his neck when he was particularly riled up.

Once, a few years back, Aziraphale had even seen him manifest a small tail. Not to speak too highly of his own sexual prowess, but Crowley had been highly distracted at the time and hadn’t seemed to notice it was there. It had been adorable, and Aziraphale had wanted to touch it. Wanted to stroke the underside of it while he fucked his demon from behind, his thumbs warm on those cool, smooth red scales. He’d thought it was the kind of thing that might feel good. Of course, that would have been a terribly presumptuous thing to do without prior discussion, and by the time Crowley had gotten in a fit state to talk again, it had vanished. It had seemed rude to bring it up later, especially since he hadn’t yet learned which parts of Crowley’s body caused discomfort and why.

With added context, the continual presence of Crowley’s sunglasses made a great deal more sense. The things Crowley had said about the Fall, about his feelings of powerlessness at being able to change every part of his body _but_ his eyes… Aziraphale knew, in his own far lesser way, the shame that came with that kind of loss of control.

“Beautiful,” he repeated, then licked a broad stripe over Crowley’s vulva and halfway up his cock. Gave it a squeeze with slicked fingers and savored the moan Crowley tried to muffle from behind his hand.

Crowley’s hips jerked, his body chasing friction and trying to fuck up into Aziraphale’s fist. Whatever he was looking for, though, he apparently couldn’t find, settling back down into the seat with a frustrated hiss.

“Are you wanting to prolong things tonight, my dear?” Aziraphale asked, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the blood-hot entrance to his lover’s body. “Or are you up for multiples?”

As expected, Crowley’s legs clenched tighter around him, trying to draw him in. “M—multiples?” He repeated. “I mean… ‘ve got the equipment for it, but…”

_But?_ Aziraphale blinked.

“Unless… you wanted to make an early night of it? I didn’t want to presume—”

“Presume away, angel, just _please_ stop teasing me,” Crowley said, clearly trying to sound snappish but only succeeding in sounding like he was moments away from shamelessly begging. “Nowhere else ‘d rather be but here.”

He’d said the last part with such bare honesty that it was almost shocking, and it was clear that it was something he hadn’t said on purpose. Hearing that confession made Aziraphale feel almost unbearably tender, made him feel a bit dizzy with it.

Crowley, he knew, was the sort to try to undercut such things with a joke. _“It was a tough call, but I’ve decided getting eaten out is a bit more fun than filling out forms,”_ Aziraphale could imagine it him saying. _“Don’t let it get to your head.”_

Before Crowley could try to walk back what he’d said, Aziraphale whispered, “Me either.”

Crowley looked at him for a moment, mouth open. Then came the quip, as he knew it would. “I’d hope not. We are in _your_ house, angel.”

Aziraphale adjusted his position between Crowley’s legs, getting more comfortable. Arched his eyebrows as he rested an elbow on Crowley’s thigh. “I am offering you as many orgasms as you’d like for the remainder of the night,” he said, giving his demon’s cock a single pump with _intent,_ just to make his point. Crowley gasped and tilted his head back, baring his neck in a tantalizing stretch. “And you are sitting there, making fun of me.”

“Nope, no— _fuck_ —not making fun,” Crowley insisted. “I’ll take—take as many as you’ll give me.”

“Is that so?” Aziraphale asked mildly. He circled Crowley’s entrance with a fingertip, pressing just hard enough to get him thinking about it, before pulling away to focus all his attentions on the demon’s cock. “Well, in that case, I think I’d best get to work. The night isn’t exactly young, and there’s quite a lot that I’d like to give you.”

It was always such a marvelous thing to watch Crowley blush. His skin turned such a deep shade of pink and it clashed so dramatically with his hair. Tonight, the flush crept all the way down to his chest, visible through the open collar of his dark shirt. Aziraphale pressed a kiss into that triangle of bare skin for no other reason than because he wanted to. Because he could.

He committed the moment to memory in pieces first, then as a glorious whole. The heat of Crowley’s skin and the soft rasp of his chest hair. The weight of his cock in his fist as he stroked him. The slightly acidic tang of his slick still clinging to his lips. The way his lean thigh filled Aziraphale’s other hand as he supported it from beneath, the muscle there tensing under his fingers. The sound of those ragged breaths, the shifting of his waistcoat against his ribs as they rose and fell. No one part conveyed the full picture before him, the sight of his lover spread open and in ecstasy at his touch, but Aziraphale never wanted to lose a single detail from this moment.

It was that careful focus that allowed him to spot the trembling. Shivering, really. He might have thought it was a sign of pleasure had he not shifted his hand and felt the prickle of gooseflesh on Crowley’s calf. The raised hairs there. His skin felt a bit cool to the touch, too. If Crowley noticed how cold he had gotten, bare from the waist down without even a blanket, he hadn’t mentioned it.

_That wouldn’t do at all._

“Bed?” Aziraphale asked, looking up at Crowley's open-mouthed face. It seemed to take him a moment to parse the question, but then Crowley huffed a breath and quietly nodded.

Aziraphale stood and unbuttoned his waistcoat, watching Crowley do the same with his own fumbling fingers. Once he’d gotten them all undone, Aziraphale scooped Crowley up out of the chair and held him against his chest supported by one arm. It was a sign of how far gone Crowley was that he didn't protest the fussy treatment. Aziraphale helped Crowley shrug out of his waistcoat and then dropped both of their garments in the seat of the armchair, cream stripe and wine-red twined together.

With his free hand, Aziraphale peeled back the layers of quilts on his bed, then set Crowley down into it. His demon writhed into the sheets with a hiss of pleasure.

“S’warm,” Crowley mumbled, and not for the first time Aziraphale found himself wondering if Crowley was entirely conscious of those sweet little smiles he gave sometimes.

“Yes, I anticipated the evening chill and ran the bed warmer over it a few times before you arrived,” Aziraphale said as he divested himself of his trousers. He noticed that Crowley had left his shirt on, but as Aziraphale tended to run warm, he opted to remove his own. “I wasn’t sure where we’d end up, but I thought I’d do it as a precaution all the same.”

Crowley looked at him with a strange, amused expression. “I got here at sundown. Sss’been hours.”

Thirty-six hours, specifically, but who was counting? Aziraphale had warmed it up early in the morning yesterday after Crowley left from the previous night’s visit, and then they’d not gone to bed at all when he’d been over again last night. They had been terribly unmotivated to relocate from the spot in front of the hearth where they’d found themselves dozing, bundled up in a pair of blankets from the sofa. The bed, dear thing that it was, had been polite enough to retain the heat until they were in a position again to use it.

“It is a terribly efficient bed warmer,” Aziraphale replied with exaggerated seriousness.

Once he’d stripped down to his underthings, Aziraphale crawled into bed between Crowley’s knees and tugged the quilts up to his shoulders.

“Be back in two shakes of a lamb's tail, my dear.”

“Where are you—?” Crowley began, then groaned at the conspiratorial wink Aziraphale gave him as he ducked his head under the quilts. “You think you’re so very funny, angel. Well, I'm not a shaking anything, and I'm no la— _aamb!”_

If Aziraphale smirked as he took Crowley's cock down to the root, Crowley couldn’t see it to know.

There was something wonderful about doing this in the dark, pressed so close to his lover's body as he felt out where he wanted to touch. Just the two of them in this tiny pocket of warmth, long legs squeezing his shoulders. That familiar salt-smoke smell of Crowley all around him.

Crowley's hands groped for him through the quilts, roving indiscriminately over Aziraphale's shoulders and the back of his head. His lovely, mobile hips twisted and ground back against the feather mattress, his legs sliding up and down the soft sheets on either side of where Aziraphale knelt.

“‘Ziraphale,” Crowley called out, the name sounding stretched and strained like it had been pulled from his lungs. “Angel.”

It always thrilled Aziraphale to see him like this, so unselfconscious in his pleasure and so responsive to Aziraphale's touch. He liked to think that his ego wasn't involved in those feelings, that he was simply happy to be of service and grateful for the chance to please his lover. Aziraphale couldn't pretend, not even to himself, that his was a wholly virtuous reaction. He didn't want to call it _pride,_ though he knew that would be how Crowley would describe it if he said any of this aloud. _Satisfaction,_ he supposed, would do as a name for what he felt. It satisfied him, right down to his core, to know that it was _him_ doing this. That it was _his_ lips, _his_ tongue reducing Crowley to writhing, slithering ecstasy, and that it was _his_ name Crowley was moaning. Aziraphale was _good at this._ He had undeniable proof that Crowley thought he was doing a good job.

There was a shifting of the blankets as Crowley plunged his arms beneath them, then shimmied to tuck the quilt back up under his chin. His hands fumbled over Aziraphale's hair, finding the hinge of his jaw and stroking him there with uncharacteristic clumsiness. Urgency.

“Keep... please. _Please,”_ Crowley babbled. Begged. “Like that. Please, angel.”

Each _please_ washed over Aziraphale like a pulse of heat from a bonfire. It was rare for them to say the word to each other, at least out in public where they couldn't be seen to be on such civil terms. Crowley in particular only seemed to say it on rare occasions, as such niceties were improper and risky for a demon to practice. To hear him say it like that, so desperate, so beyond caring about the role he had to play, made Aziraphale desperate too. He needed to give Crowley everything he had so sweetly begged for.

Aziraphale reached for Crowley's hand and slid it further down the side of his face. The demon's palm was rough in places from a hundred human lifetimes of work, his fingers long and nimble. The hand of an artist, that’s how he'd always thought of it. Cold, at least currently, and lightly calloused. Twitching and grasping, vibrantly alive. Hand over hand, Aziraphale showed him the shape of the love that they were making beneath the cover of the quilts. Held that palm against his cheek so Crowley could feel the press of his own cock through it. Rested those delicate fingertips on his spit-slick lips so Crowley could feel how they stretched around the heavy thickness of him. He wanted to give his demon the same thing he had taken for himself—the opportunity to memorize this and save it sensation by sensation, detail by detail.

Crowley's hips bucked up off the mattress, seemingly beyond his control. Aziraphale didn't gag, didn't choke, even as he felt Crowley bump the back of his throat. It hadn't taken a miracle. After all this time, Aziraphale's body loved Crowley as much as the rest of him did, and it trusted on a cellular level that nothing Crowley did would ever hurt.

When Crowley came for the first time that night, he did so with Aziraphale’s name on his lips. Aziraphale swallowed around him with a muffled moan, pressing his hips against the feather mattress to try to forestall the rekindling of his own need and arousal. There would be time for all of that later, most likely, and he had a _plan_ for how he wanted to do this. Step by careful step, wringing all the pleasure he could from his lover’s body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical Note:**  
> [ LiquidLyrium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liquid_Lyrium/pseuds/Liquid_Lyrium), Couchologist and resident Emotionally Significant Furniture expert, suggested that the armchair Crowley gave to Aziraphale (stole from the Alderman way back in chapter 5) might be a [Chippendale](https://www.worthpoint.com/dictionary/p/furniture-furnishings/united-states/chippendale-furniture). Gosh, that example chair sure is sexy. I am happy to accept that diagnosis, Dr. Liquid. Thank you for your service.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Forget all other relationship dynamics, I want to talk about the real cornerstone of romance: maintaining thermodynamic equilibrium. The ideal relationship has one person who is a heat source and one who is a heat sink (in two person relationships, at least, but I assume the ratio would just scale up with the size of a bigger polycule? Idk, they didn’t teach me math in librarian school). Anyway, if I seem fixated on the inherent romanticism of keeping a partner warm, you can blame that on my wife putting her ice-cold feet on me while I’m writing. I do not know if she actually _is_ a mammal, and at this point, I’m too afraid to ask. Babe, if you’re reading this… _put some socks on, you fucking reptile._
> 
> Work is slowly sucking my soul out of my body, and I am almost out of buffer chapters. :( To hopefully dodge having to take another hiatus, I’m going to switch to a once-every-two-weeks posting schedule until I can catch back up. Next chapter, the last in 1816 and the end of our Aziraphale POV interlude, goes up **Thursday, October 22nd.** There will be WIP Wednesday previews on tumblr the two Wednesdays before then.


	13. Sunrise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale shivered and screwed his eyes shut against the ache growing in the muscles in his back.
> 
> But what he was feeling wasn’t quite _in_ his back, was it? His muscles ached, but only because his corporation was trying to process something much larger than itself, translating unnamable ethereal sensations into ones that could be read by a human-like nervous system.
> 
> It wasn’t pain, he knew. It was want. Desire. _Need._ Whether he knew it or not, Crowley’s hands were tugging at the places where his wings were tethered to his physical form, and Aziraphale felt them trembling on another plane, flapping like they could tear themselves free and open into reality. Spread wide over this bed, a mantle the color of snow but so much warmer, so he could finally, _finally_ feel the touch of Crowley’s clever fingers in his feathers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't... think I have anything to warn about this time? At least not specifically, that is. As far as I can tell, there's not really anything I can think of that goes further than the general anxiety, doubt, and pining that makes up the tone of this fic, but if you see something that needs a tag, let me know. As always: blanket note for sex that's maybe a little angsty, but always based in love.
> 
> Specific sex acts: Hand jobs, oral sex, multiple orgasms, marathon sex.  
> Carrying over from last chapter, Aziraphale still has his trusty peen and Crowley still has that double Effort (that is, a penis and a vulva, not two penises/two vulvas… though I _should_ write a scene like that sometime, now that I’m thinking about it).

Pushing himself up on his elbows, Aziraphale crawled back out from beneath the quilts. He knelt between Crowley’s legs, sparing a moment to fully appreciate the sight of his demon spread out beneath him, looking like he was quite prepared to melt into the mattress. Crowley was always gorgeous, but like this, he was _breathtaking._ There was a dazed smile on his face, all the more precious for the little fangs there. Aziraphale couldn’t help but run a hand down Crowley’s thin chest, fingers trailing over a nipple where his shirt hung open, riding the motion of his heavy breathing.

“Do you want more, dear?” Aziraphale asked him, massaging Crowley's splayed legs as he moved them around. Made more space to sit between them.

Crowley was flushed and clearly a little overwhelmed, but he nodded eagerly all the same. Aziraphale kissed the insides of his knees and then hoisted them up, bending Crowley's body nearly in half.

_“Ah—angel!”_ His demon huffed out, his head tilting backwards against the pillows.

Aziraphale traced a thumb up along the side of Crowley’s quim, trailing off at the base of his spent cock where it lay against the demon’s belly. Aziraphale watched as his lover’s hips strained weakly at his touch and circled back again, wanting to give Crowley every drop of pleasure he could.

A sigh pushed out of Crowley’s lungs as Aziraphale slipped a finger inside the slick-soft heat of his body. It was clear he was still coming down from his orgasm, still floating in the afterglow, and Aziraphale worked him through it gently, not wanting his touches to overwork his live-wire nerves.

Any capacity Crowley might have once had for speech was evidently still evading him. He did his best to force his tongue around the occasional _‘angel,’_ communicating the rest of his pleasure with gasps and moans and sometimes a strange, needy little hitching sound that Aziraphale might have feared was a sob if it hadn’t been for the way Crowley pressed his hips harder against his hand when he did so.

Seeing Crowley so wrecked and incoherent, so desperate for his touch, went to Aziraphale’s head more than the best champagne ever could. He was so fortunate to have been able to dedicate years to the study of Crowley’s body and Crowley’s pleasure, wanting to learn every possible way to take his lover apart. Aziraphale wasn’t an expert yet, but this was the sort of thing he hoped he would be able to keep practicing for the rest of his life.

It was easy to forget sometimes how new all of this still was for the two of them. Well, new to them as a _them._ While Aziraphale hadn't ever thought of himself as a blushing virgin, there had been a time in the very recent past when he had only ever found his pleasure alone. In spite of his extensive research, both with books and with his own two hands, he and Crowley had begun their physical relationship with mismatched levels of experience. By now, though, Aziraphale thought that he could probably be considered to be reasonably experienced with lovemaking. At least compared to the average human. Twenty-four years learning the tastes of one consistent partner... why, that was on par with what might be experienced by a married couple.

Not that he should be thinking in those terms, of course.

Aziraphale added a second finger. Dragged them both slowly in and out, rocking his wrist to fuck Crowley on his hand, a time-honored technique that he knew Crowley loved. His lover writhed against him, nuzzled his nose and open mouth against Aziraphale’s other wrist where he’d had put a hand on the mattress near Crowley’s head to support his weight.

He wanted to kiss him, needed to hold him, burned to close that distance between them that seemed too vast and too cold. Aziraphale dropped to his elbow and draped the rest of his body over the length of Crowley’s. Pressed a messy string of kisses up Crowley’s neck and jaw. Slotted their mouths together and tried to communicate with voiceless teeth and lips and tongue all the things he wouldn’t even know how to say out loud. His hand was crushed between their bodies at an awkward angle but Aziraphale didn’t stop, shifting to a smaller, faster motion he could do with his fingers alone. Stroked him just inside his entrance, curling his fingertips against slick, tight muscle.

Crowley wrapped around him, vise-tight as he panted and squeezed and tried to press Aziraphale to him ever-closer. His feet were cool, even under the quilts, and felt scaly almost all the way up to the knee. His hands went immediately to Aziraphale’s shoulder blades, grabbing and petting at them with fingers that weren’t quite claws. Aziraphale shivered, pressed his hips down against the mattress again, and screwed his eyes shut against the ache growing in the muscles in his back.

But what he was feeling wasn’t quite _in_ his back, was it? His muscles ached, but only because his corporation was trying to process something much larger than itself, translating unnamable ethereal sensations into ones that could be read by a human-like nervous system.

It wasn’t pain, he knew. It was want. Desire. _Need._ Whether he knew it or not, Crowley’s hands were tugging at the places where his wings were tethered to his physical form, and Aziraphale felt them trembling on another plane, flapping like they could tear themselves free and open into reality. Spread wide over this bed, a mantle the color of snow but so much warmer, so he could finally, _finally_ feel the touch of Crowley’s clever fingers in his feathers.

How long had it been since he’d last had them out? Aziraphale didn’t remember. He kept his wings tucked away for so much of the time, and sometimes he even forgot that they were there. He only brought them out when the situation called for it, as they were a hassle to deal with in the confines of the messy shop and the humans tended to find them more alarming than inspiring these days.

Right now, he felt those forgotten limbs aching in their little pockets of space. Straining to break free, wanting to wrap around his lover’s beautiful body like a blanket. Like a shield. Hold him close, keep him safe. Hide him from all eyes but the ten million or so Aziraphale kept tucked away within himself that longed to look their fill.

_No._

Aziraphale crushed that longing down, steadied himself. Focused on Crowley and the expression of pleasure twisting his face. Focused on his own breathing. Remembered how Crowley’s face had looked earlier tonight, the pain he’d seen there when they’d sat side by side on the sofa, Crowley struggling to say what he needed.

Eventually, the ache subsided.

Crowley had asked him ever so directly tonight to keep things between the two of them as human-shaped as possible, and Aziraphale was going to respect that. It seemed to cost Crowley so much to ask Aziraphale for anything, to assert his own wants and needs… and he’d been so _anxious_ afterward, so afraid he’d put Aziraphale off by restating his boundaries. No, Aziraphale was going to make sure he never made that same mistake again. If Crowley could put up with wearing spectacles every time they made love, Aziraphale could keep his wings—and his extra eyes—inside himself where they belonged.

_“An—angel,”_ Crowley panted, arms wrapping around Aziraphale’s neck and holding him closer.

Nuzzling his face against his lover’s cheek, Aziraphale murmured his affection into Crowley’s ear. “So clever,” he said, fingers twisting and pushing. “Wily, brilliant thing. Handsome.” Each word was punctuated by a press of lips to the serpent tattoo twisting beneath the earpiece of his glasses.

He felt the gentle rasp of Crowley’s stubble against his cheek as his lover’s mouth opened on a gasp. Aziraphale turned his head to meet his frantic kiss, felt the deepening notch in Crowley’s tongue as it slipped into his mouth. Crowley’s hips jerked upwards into his touch, fucking himself on Aziraphale’s fingers. Pressing his renewed erection into the soft swell of Aziraphale’s belly, close enough to Aziraphale’s own straining cock that he could feel the heat of it through his undergarments. There was a wet spot there where his own precome had soaked through, and Aziraphale wondered if Crowley could feel that, too. If his dear demon could tell what a mess he made of Aziraphale without even needing to touch him. How ruined Aziraphale was after only _watching_ him chase his pleasure.

“It feels incredible to touch you like this,” he confessed against Crowley’s lips. “To feel you open so sweetly for me.”

Crowley’s back arched off the bed, cunt clenching around Aziraphale’s fingers. His head turned away sharply, twisting back and pressing into the pillow as he hissed with pleasure, and the way the movement bared Crowley’s throat was a temptation Aziraphale just couldn’t resist. Aziraphale kissed him through his second climax, open-mouthed and hungry, starting at his collarbone and forging a path up to his jaw. Scraping his teeth against his neck with each kiss, never hard enough to hurt or bruise, just hard enough to let him _feel._ Tongue tasting the pulse jumping just below his salt-slicked skin.

By the time he reached Crowley’s mouth again, the demon was limp and grinning.

“Alright?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley’s arms twitched weakly where they lay on the pillow, having been flung up above his head like he was modelling one of the more suggestive paintings of that poor fellow Sebastian’s martyrdom—sans arrows, of course, but perhaps just as enraptured. Eventually, he managed to answer with a shaky but unmistakable double thumbs-up. Aziraphale could only smile and kiss him again.

“More?” He asked, giving an experimental nudge of his fingers where they were still buried in Crowley’s warm, wet cunt. The movement prompted another spasm of muscle like an aftershock, and Crowley bore down on his hand as he sucked in a breath through his teeth.

Aziraphale stayed very still, wary of causing any discomfort, but Crowley reached up for him. Gripped his upper arms with both hands as he nodded. A single firm, significant squeeze, a gesture they’d used for decades to help Crowley say _“yes”_ when his words got away from him.

“Yeah,” Crowley confirmed, forcing himself to say the words anyway. Swallowed, said the rest on an exhale. “‘F’you want.”

Eyes fluttering closed, Aziraphale’s hips moved of their own accord, grinding against Crowley where he lay beneath him. There was no puddle of spend between them, and Crowley was still hard—apparently, when he had two sets of genitals, Crowley’s quim could orgasm without it causing one in his cock. Aziraphale filed that discovery away under the mental heading _Very Important Information._ Currently, his lust-addled brain was trying to distract him with the image of banishing his own undergarments and rutting against Crowley’s cock until they both came again, but he realized that there was still more that he could do here. Still more that he could _give._

“Both?” He followed the question with another roll of his hips, trying to make sure Crowley understood what he meant. The frantic nodding and the way his demon squeezed him again, almost painfully tight, gave him all the encouragement he needed.

“Sit up,” he said, and as Crowley pushed himself up on his elbows, Aziraphale slid his fingers out of his lover’s body.

Before his demon could complain about the loss of contact, Aziraphale tugged the topmost quilt out from where it was tucked in at the foot of the bed and wrapped it around Crowley’s shoulders like a shawl. To do this properly, he would need to slide a bit further down the bed and wouldn’t be able to keep Crowley warm by lying on him anymore. It wouldn’t do to let him be distracted by a draft, not when he’d come up with such a clever idea in making that double Effort. Crowley deserved to be comfortable while they were used to full effect.

As he guided Crowley down to lie on his back again, Aziraphale’s eyes were drawn to the stain he left on the quilt, two pale smudges of his demon’s slick on the blanket’s deep blue border. Crowley’s hand came up to grab both corners of the quilt, holding them together at the level of his collarbone where his shirt hung open. The mark peeked out from between his long fingers, a pair of fingerprints showing where they had been and what they had done. It was evidence, and it would need to be cleaned after Crowley left, but Aziraphale committed the sight of it to memory nevertheless.

Aziraphale let his hand wander below the quilt, up beneath the edge of Crowley’s shirt. He took his time tracing the planes of his stomach and ribs, focusing on the feel of skin and heat and sweat. When he was certain he had Crowley’s full attention, he slipped his other hand back between Crowley’s legs. Circled his entrance with a thumb at the same time he rolled one of the demon’s nipples between a thumb and a finger. Kissed him deep and slow as he let his lover wriggle his hips lower and lower until he’d pushed Aziraphale’s fingers back inside his quim.

It was like he could feel Crowley’s heartbeat everywhere at once—in his mouth, in the heat of his cunt, beneath Aziraphale’s palm. As he stroked Crowley’s chest with a thumb, feeling the demon’s lively little heart hammering away beneath his ribs, Aziraphale was reminded sharply that, in a very real way, Crowley was the reason why his own heart was still beating. If Crowley hadn’t saved this body from discorporation in Paris, there would be a different heart pumping Aziraphale’s blood right now—if Heaven had even allowed him to get a replacement corporation, that is. That new heart wouldn’t know all the things Aziraphale’s did, wouldn’t have been the one he was used to. The heart he had now had been in his chest since the Beginning, and it had been Crowley of all people who had told him that he needed to let it beat on its own.

_“It’s a little thing, but the humans can tell if it’s turned off,”_ Crowley had told him over a shared jug of wine. _“Even if they don’t touch you, they can sometimes tell.”_

They’d been sitting beneath a tree, a rare patch of shade in the hot sun, watching the humans bustle about in the village nearby. It had been one of the very first proper villages in human history, named in a language long since lost to the mortals, and one of the first places Aziraphale had gone where he’d needed to keep his wings tucked inside himself.

_“Really?”_ Aziraphale had asked, more curious about the abilities of the mortals in his care than he was about whether the demon was trying to trick him. _“How can they know?”_

_“Dunno. They’re perceptive. I don’t know if they even know what it is that they’re sensing, but if you’re breathing, and blinking, and your heart’s beating… it helps keep them from realizing they’re talking to someone who’s like_ us _and not like_ them.”

Hours had passed in pleasant company, Aziraphale’s heart beating the seconds away, before it occurred to him to notice that Crowley had shared information that would make Aziraphale’s job easier. For free, with nothing expected in return. What kind of demon did that for an angel?

It was even later than that, after Crowley himself had left, before Aziraphale had noticed the phrasing. _Like us and not like them._ Crowley had said _‘them,’_ and he’d clearly been referring to the humans. To everyone else who wasn’t _‘us.’_ He’d said _‘us,’_ and he’d not meant Hell, not meant the rest of the Fallen. He’d meant himself… and Aziraphale. Crowley had placed the two of them in the same category. It had frightened Aziraphale, then, to realize he’d just… accepted that distinction without question. That in the moment, he hadn’t even noticed it as odd. It had frightened him even more to notice that a part of him wanted to believe it.

“Are you ready?” Aziraphale asked, pushing himself up off of Crowley to settle between the demon’s legs.

Crowley nodded as he hugged the quilt tighter around himself. “Ssss’not… not going to take long,” he mumbled through a crooked, dazed-looking smile.

“Is that so?” Aziraphale teased, pressing a kiss to Crowley’s hipbone.

“Fucksake, just had two in a row,” Crowley sighed, wriggling deeper into the softness of the feather mattress. “Might pop off like a human teenager if y’even look at me wrong. Just a warning.”

“I don’t mind if it takes you thirty seconds or thirty years,” Aziraphale insisted, kissing closer and closer to the base of Crowley’s cock. “I just want you to feel good. Let me make you feel good.”

He took Crowley into his mouth like the scrummy treat he was, licking and teasing at the tip even as he crooked his fingers inside him like he knew would light Crowley up from with.

Almost every part of Crowley's body was hard and lean, though there was a soft layer of fat padding his belly that Aziraphale loved to pet when given a chance. He had to be careful, moving slowly and with even pressure, because the ridiculous creature was terribly ticklish and even worse about hiding it.

While his mouth and right hand were busy, Aziraphale rested his left hand on Crowley's stomach. Low, just above the jut of those sharp hip bones. He pressed his palm gently down until, through skin and fat and muscle, he could feel his own fingers moving inside his lover's quim, rubbing circles into the hot, soft walls there, trying to feel, to _know_ every part of Crowley at once.

He wasn’t quite sure what it was that did it, whether it was something he’d done with his hand or with his mouth, or even the way he thrust his own cock against the mattress in helpless need, but Crowley thrashed beneath him. Pushed himself upright like a jackknife, his knees rising to bracket Aziraphale where he lay in his lap. Still holding on to the corners of the blanket in his hands, Crowley leaned as far forward as his serpentine spine would allow, pressing his face into the middle of Aziraphale’s back.

It was a surprisingly thrilling position, Aziraphale realized. Crowley was simply draped over him, not really doing much of anything to try to hold him down, but Aziraphale found he quite liked the idea of being held in place while he sucked his demon’s cock. He’d have to ask about this in the future, this happy accident, and see if they could do it again on purpose.

Crowley’s hands slipped under Aziraphale’s hips, into his pants. There was no room like this for him to do much of anything, but the sheer relief of being touched after being on edge for so long had Aziraphale moaning around Crowley’s cock. He greedily took what was offered, rutting into Crowley’s palm while Crowley embraced him and shook to pieces all around him.

As the taste of salt bloomed bright and sharp in his mouth, as his fingers were squeezed by the gentle heat of Crowley’s body, Aziraphale thought about the arms that were circling him. Thought of the way Crowley had bent down low over him, covering him with body and quilt alike. It was like being mantled by the demon's wings, and _oh,_ wasn't that a thought? It couldn't hurt, could it, just to pretend?

After what felt like hours of keeping himself from giving in to his own arousal, keeping himself focused only on Crowley’s pleasure, it was the thought of being wrapped in black feathers that finally pushed Aziraphale over the edge. He spilled over Crowley’s palm, soaked through his own underthings and probably the sheet, too.

As he came down from the brightness of his orgasm, the exhaustion he’d been ignoring flowed into him like cream into tea. Crowley, too, seemed like he was wrung out. Limp and panting where he lay across Aziraphale’s back. Aziraphale disentangled their bodies as carefully as he could, wary of agitating Crowley’s overstimulated Efforts. He pushed himself into a seated position and tugged Crowley up into his lap, bearing the demon’s full weight as he collapsed against him again. It felt good to be held like this, too, chest to chest with Crowley’s arms and legs around his waist, the sharpness of Crowley’s chin against his shoulder. The cold press of his glasses against his neck.

“How are you feeling?” Aziraphale asked, bringing a hand up so he could cup the back of Crowley’s neck.

Crowley’s answer was muffled and slurred, but Aziraphale understood it all the same. “Have t’carry me ev’rywhere now. I don’t think I c’n’move.”

“Too much?”

His demon shook his head. “Nuh. S’okay. Fuckin’… fuckin’ good sex. Jus’ don’have bones ‘nymore.” Another, firmer shake. “S’okay. Don’ need ’em.”

Aziraphale felt a surge of love and affection bright enough he was surprised his halo didn’t kick on from it. It would be so damnably easy to say it, just let the words trip off his tongue and be done with it. No more secrets, nothing else hidden between them. Just tell Crowley everything and let him react however he liked. All those unsaid words were like ballast in his stomach, keeping him tethered to the earth, and if he finally spoke them, Aziraphale thought he would probably feel so light he’d start to float off the bed. Confession was supposed to be a healing thing, after all. That’s what they’d told him to tell the humans. It was supposed to be a balm for the soul, and even though Aziraphale hadn’t been issued one of those, he felt the urge to bring the truth out into daylight anyway.

And really, what would happen if he said it? Right here, in this perfect, beautiful moment, what would happen if he let this last, most hidden secret slip? Aziraphale could only see two outcomes.

...No, no. Three. Three outcomes, because it was always a possibility that if he ever got up the courage to just bloody say it already, to tell Crowley he loved him, that the ground would split open and swallow his dear demon back down to face the torments of Hell and Aziraphale would be smote to ash where he stood. Or perhaps the crack in the ground would be wide enough to send them both down to Hell. Aziraphale wasn't quite sure how these sort of things went, as there was no precedent for _this sort of a thing._ Even in the face of twenty-four years of secret trysts and nearly eight hundred years of the Arrangement, it _was_ still possible that their sides were waiting around for a stark declaration like that to tear them asunder. That they were looking for _proof._

But, assuming that they weren't caught and made to face the swift and brutal justice of Heaven and Hell, there were two main ways he could see it going.

Option one: he would bare his heart and say, _“Look here, my dear fellow, I think I'm in love with you. Actually, I know that I am, and I have been since at least when we formalized the Arrangement, but, if I'm being honest with myself, it probably started a few millennia before that.”_ ...and Crowley would tell him that he didn't reciprocate. Whether he'd be insulted and angry or kind enough to let Aziraphale down gently was still a variable, but the important bit was that this was a scenario where Crowley would not be interested in a romantic relationship. It would probably result in the termination of their sexual relationship, as Crowley didn't seem to be the sort to want to carry on with someone who clearly wanted something very different out of it. Aziraphale hoped—again, pinning those hopes on Crowley's capacity for forgiveness—that if that were what came to pass, they could stay friends and keep up the Arrangement.

Terrified as he was at the possibility of hearing that Crowley didn't love him, it was the alternative that truly frightened him.

Option two: he would bare his heart, say, _“Crowley, my darling, I know that you are a demon of Hell, and I am one of Heaven's angels, and as such it is terribly improper of me to say such a thing, but I seem to have fallen impossibly in love with you to the point where the thing I most dread in this world is the inevitable day when we are parted,”_ .... and Crowley would tell him that he loved him back.

Oh, it would feel wonderful, he was sure. Better than anything else. It was all he secretly hoped for. But... Aziraphale _knew_ Crowley. Very well, he thought, after nearly six thousand years. Crowley was a being with a deeply entrenched stubborn streak, dogged persistence, incredible bravery, and an unbreakable sense of optimism. If Crowley loved him, and knew that it was mutual, no threat from Heaven, Hell, or even God Herself could stop him from finding a way to be with Aziraphale. And at first, it would probably work. He was a terribly clever demon, and they might be able to find some way to be happy together, undiscovered, for quite some time. Maybe even up to the very End.

But that's when it really counted. The End.

Aziraphale had decided centuries ago that he wouldn’t be the one to strike Crowley down when that day finally came. He’d comforted himself—what small comfort it was—with the thought that when Armageddon arrived and their sides were both called to war, Aziraphale would look across the expanse, spot that flash of red hair among the ranks of Hell, and then run the opposite direction. Throw himself into combat with other demons, as far from Crowley as he could get. Crowley, Aziraphale told himself, was clever and fast and would be able to keep himself out of trouble. If anyone could find their way out of the end of the world, it would be Crowley.

They’d talked about the end of the world once, some two hundred years ago at the bottom of a bottle of wine. What it might be like, what it would really mean, all posturing and propaganda from their sides ignored. That day, Aziraphale had extracted a promise from the demon he that intended to collect on. It was the one thought that kept Aziraphale going, sometimes, that _promise_ that Crowley would try to keep himself safe through Armageddon. Not attempt any foolish heroics, not try to do something stupid like try to find Aziraphale and save him. Just... _run,_ as fast as he could and never look back.

Aziraphale knew, as certainly as he knew that he loved Crowley, that to tell Crowley would be to condemn him. If Crowley loved him, knew that Aziraphale loved him back... all that stubbornness, persistence, bravery, and optimism would get him killed. He would never be willing to leave Aziraphale's side, and Aziraphale needed to trust that Crowley would _run._

_He’d let you destroy him,_ that voice inside of his mind reminded him. The voice wasn’t cruel this time, as it had been earlier this evening when it had picked at each of Aziraphale’s fears and insecurities with a precision Gabriel and Michael could only dream of. In fact, it was almost kind, almost patient, in a way that Aziraphale so rarely was with himself. That didn’t change how much it hurt to hear.

_He’d destroy himself for you if you asked him to,_ it continued, so very gentle, and not a word of it was a lie. _If he thought that’s what you needed._

Even though it hurt him—probably would hurt Crowley, too, if it was mutual—Aziraphale had no choice but to keep silent. He would rather live a thousand millennia in this sweet doubt, never knowing what was in Crowley's heart, than doom Crowley to oblivion.

They'd never get the chance to be real lovers, certainly not out in the open, not really even in private. But they could have this, this close shadow of a proper relationship, and Aziraphale could use all the time they had left to show Crowley how deeply he was loved.

There was red light on the wall opposite the window, streaking the mantle and the top of the door. Positioned like they were with Crowley facing away, Aziraphale thought he might have a few seconds before Crowley would notice it, maybe as much as a minute or two. He spent that time in the best way he could imagine, by holding his dear demon's slight body in his arms. Holding him as closer, focusing on the feeling of that racing, steady heartbeat against his skin for as long as he could. He kissed him, slow and tender, as he ran his hands through Crowley's short-cropped, sweaty hair.

Feeling time drip away from them like blood from a wound, Aziraphale held on tight and did not breathe. His heartbeat, fast as it was, could be explained as a sign of exhilaration, lingering arousal. Something besides the panicked thing it threatened to become. But his breathing, if he let himself breathe, would be ragged and shallow, and Crowley would know. He’d know, and he’d spend the last seconds they had together here trying to soothe Aziraphale again. That wasn’t what Aziraphale wanted. He just wanted to hold, and be held, and pretend like this could last forever.

The world he pretended he lived in had no more goodbyes. There was a space there big enough for two, carved out of Aziraphale’s solitary life. The bookshop was a clever, flexible dear. It would make room for Crowley to stay here as long as he liked. If Aziraphale was honest with himself, he’d designed this place to be large enough to be a home for the both of them, right from the beginning. Crowley was flexible, too, and there were ways he could hide here. No one would have to know he was staying here, and he would be safe.

Aziraphale closed his eyes tight against the spread of that red light on the opposite wall.

For all the sad sunrises Aziraphale had known in recent years—after all, dawn was when Crowley preferred to leave their encounters and go his own way—he found that he still loved them. So often, they burned with the most beautiful crimsons and golds, those colors that Aziraphale hoarded so fervently in his memories. He always stopped short of speculating about Her feelings about what they were doing, but sometimes he couldn’t help but think there must be some meaning in the sight of his love’s colors painting the dawn. The horizon bold and shining like Crowley’s fiery hair. The gold of his eyes making a halo around the sun. Some of the humans said that a red sky at dawn should be taken as a warning. There was a small, secret part of Aziraphale that liked to think it might be a sign instead.

He was good with those. Signs. Picking out details from a bigger picture, making connections. Seeing patterns. Aziraphale had been doing it a lot lately in these days since the sky had been darkened. Volcanic eruptions and their aftermath were nothing new—Aziraphale still remembered what it had been like after Pompeii, after all—but something about this year had gotten to him. Gotten to the humans, too. They were producing prophetic works faster than Aziraphale could read them. So many of them were terrified that the changes to their fragile planet were the symptoms of some sinister event approaching. An ending. _The_ Ending. Most of the prophecies were either total fabrications or hallucinations, but some of them seemed to have grasped at some part of a greater design. Aziraphale pored over these writings, searching for pattern and meaning. For some kind of a _clue._

Whenever he could find the time to sit and read, that was. Whenever he wasn’t off trying to ease the most acute suffering caused by Famine and Pestilence, mending a little of the damage those two left in their wake. Keeping his distance when he heard the rustle of Death’s wings. Trying to remind himself just how little he was allowed to help. He couldn’t afford to bring extra scrutiny upon himself, not when Crowley was so often close at hand.

The sunset had been so vivid earlier, so beautiful when he’d first glimpsed it through the doorway to the alley behind the shop. Red like the skin of an apple, one bite away from the promise of all he could ever wish to know and more. It had been easy enough to feel like it might have meant something.

Then, just minutes later, only as long as it had taken to get up to the roof, the sky had already grown so much darker. Deeper. An unnatural red, like dye bleeding through the haze and clouds to stain the Heavens. When he stood beneath it, shoulder to shoulder with Crowley, Aziraphale had been unable to make himself see signs of an optimistic future written in the clouds overhead. It had shaken him to see that vivid scarlet, that piercing yellow, those colors that had always been such a comfort to him. He knew too much, recognized them for what they really were. Stains of poisons streaking the atmosphere. Aziraphale couldn’t help but wonder if he should see them as a threat. Was it all nature and random chance? If there was a pattern in it, it might be the same ominous warning that had so frightened the humans.

Beneath that red sky, Crowley's sharp face had looked gaunt and shadowed and fragile, and Aziraphale had done his best to hide the way his eyes blurred with tears.

He felt Crowley stir in his arms, felt him stretch, and he knew the moment was over. Knew it even before that sweet, dry press of lips to his cheek tried to take away the sting of what came next.

“Better… better get going,” Crowley said, mumbling his excuses against Aziraphale’s skin. “Got a… got a thing. In the afternoon. Got to get ready for it.”

Aziraphale nodded and hummed in answer, not trusting himself to say much more than that—or, indeed, to start breathing again as usual yet. He’d need to learn someday to be content with what he’d been given.

Crowley unfolded himself, shaky and unsteady as he slid off the edge of the bed to stand. Aziraphale felt a stab of guilt for letting the hours get away from them like this, for pushing too far when he knew there might not be time for a proper come down at the end. At least Crowley was smiling, loose and relaxed. Maybe even happy. Aziraphale hoped he was.

“Guh. Feel like m’drunk off it,” Crowley slurred, supporting himself with a hand on the headboard as he tried to stand on wobbly knees. He cleaned them both off with a wave of his hand, the miracle prickling over Aziraphale’s skin, and dressed himself with a snap. “Probably going to stagger off’n fall in the Thames.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” Aziraphale refused to let himself dwell on the image of breaking ice and filthy, frozen water. “Besides, isn’t that the opposite way from where you’re staying?”

“Yeah, m’over in…” Crowley waved a hand to the in a vaguely northward direction. “Islington. For now.”

“You’ll make it home safely,” he said, a thin thread of power woven through the words.

Crowley mumbled something that sounded like it might have been, “Not going home.”

Aziraphale was about to wave it off, to wish him safely to wherever he was headed, when he noticed that Crowley seemed to have frozen up. Shoulders starting to creep towards his ears. Like he’d said something he shouldn’t.

“I meant…” Crowley started, still looking down at the headboard. “Y’know. Rented a room there. This time. That’s all I meant.”

Perplexed as he was by that strange moment of tension, Aziraphale decided to let it pass. It hadn’t seemed like something Crowley was particularly interested in explaining, and he didn’t want to waste their last seconds this morning pressing for an answer.

He exhaled finally, and it sounded so much closer to a sigh than he’d meant. Crowley peered at him, curiosity clear even behind those dark glasses. Those lenses would be even bigger soon, Aziraphale remembered. He was getting new ones that would cover up even more of his face. Aziraphale stared at him for a long moment, trying to commit the sight to memory before he lost his chance. He made himself smile, but the longer he looked, the more he found he didn’t really have to force it at all. It was never a hardship to look at that face.

“Your stockings are in your shoes by the hearth,” he said, as if they weren’t in that same spot almost every time they used the bedroom, “and your smaller things, your scarf and so forth, are in your coat pocket.”

As Crowley made his way over to the hook behind the door, Aziraphale extracted himself from the quilts and plucked up his dressing gown from where it was folded on top of the chest at the foot of the bed. He slipped into it, tied it closed around himself. Crowley was midway through the process of bundling himself up in his coat and scarf by the time Aziraphale turned around. He saw that he had the pair of mittens in his hands, the one’s Aziraphale had impulsively slipped in with the rest of Crowley’s things earlier in the night—not wearing them, just holding them and looking them over.

“I wasn't wearing mittens when I came over,” Crowley said, his voice unreadable. Aziraphale smiled on reflex.

“Oh. I hadn’t noticed.” He had. “They were downstairs. Perhaps they were... left over from a prior visit?” They weren’t.

Aziraphale hoped that Crowley would buy the lie, or at least not scold him too sternly for fretting over him. There was a strange twist to Crowley's lips, almost like a sneer, as he stared down at the thick, wooly mittens he was holding. They were brown and fuzzy, well outside of the demon’s regular color scheme and exactly the kind of clothing Crowley would mock if he saw Aziraphale wearing them. He could easily imagine the way Crowley might snarl and say, _“Do I look like the type to wear mittens?”_

Crowley didn't say anything like that. The demon just slipped them on, tugged them down over his bony wrists, and said, “I’d better keep a close watch on these. Wouldn't do to leave my things around your shop again.” Crowley cleared his throat. “Evidence, and suchlike.”

“Yes. Of course.”

There was a moment of tension, then, where it seemed as though neither of them quite knew what to do or say. They did this so often, these goodbyes, but they ached every time. They were necessary, though, for keeping them both safe, and Crowley was the stronger one out of the pair of them about enforcing that aspect of their Arrangement. Aziraphale kissed him, chaste and gentle, and was rewarded with another of Crowley's rare little soft smiles.

“Mind how you go,” he told him. Then, in a firmer voice, “And no going for any early morning swims.”

“‘Course not.” Crowley turned his head and left, his shoulders creeping up near his ears again, but it was less anxious of a gesture than it had been before. He also didn't manage to turn fast enough to hide the way that soft smile stretched into something like a shy grin.

What Aziraphale wanted to do then was walk him out, but that wasn't how they did things. One kiss up here was fine, but following him down would only lead to another at the foot of the stairs, which carried with it the risk of an extended bout of snogging by the back door. Aziraphale didn't trust himself to pull away and let Crowley leave, so he made himself stay put.

As Crowley closed the bedroom door behind him, the bookshop itself seemed to shrug, beams and plaster briefly rippling like the skin of a horse twitching to shoo away a fly. Aziraphale looked up to the ceiling. The hatch up to the roof was back, and perhaps...

For propriety's sake, and out of deference to the unseasonable weather, Aziraphale pulled his trousers back on beneath his dressing gown. Donned a house coat and his slippers. He tugged the hatch down and scaled the ladder as he heard the back door shut, as he felt Crowley slip through the gap in the wards. An intentional mistake, like a dropped stitch in an otherwise perfect weave. Left there from the start like a promise for him and him alone so that he might come and go as he pleased.

Silent and still, his face intentionally neutral, Aziraphale watched the thin, dark figure of his lover as he made his escape, stalking down the alley behind the shop like a shadow. To an outside observer it would look—or, at least Aziraphale hoped it would look—like he was watching an enemy retreat after passing a little too close to Heaven's territory.

Crowley was nearly to the street when he turned to look back. Heart accelerating in his chest, Aziraphale met his gaze. Neither of them waved, gave any sign of farewell. That wasn't the kind of thing that they did, that they could do, but this. This was close enough, maybe.

The demon looked away, rounded the corner, and disappeared. Aziraphale went back inside to make a cup of tea and tried to ignore how empty the shop felt with only himself in it. The trouble with having Crowley over so often was that Aziraphale grew used to having him here, and had to painfully remind himself that they didn't _live together._

Although... It had been only two weeks this time, and there was still no word of when Crowley would be called away again. Maybe he'd find some excuse today to have Crowley over again. Maybe he'd be smarter about it and wait until next week... If they had a next week.

No matter what happened, Aziraphale trusted that they'd find a way to steal the time they needed. They always had before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Non-Historical Note:** Another chapter with no historical notes. Yeesh. It feels weird at this point to not have anything to tell you about the time period or the historical context, so instead I'll just tell you something vaguely cool. Minutes before posting this, I found and absolutely _beautiful_ lizard in our kitchen. I think it was some kind of skink, but it had soulful eyes. It has been released out into the wild.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Wahoo! This fic has now broken 100k! It is, by a wide margin, the biggest single fic I’ve written. It’s also not even that close to being done. There is at least a tentative chapter count up, though that may change. The estimate is based on how many time periods we have left to cover (four) and how chonky each of those scenes feels like it’s likely to be (very).  
> We have perhaps three more chapters (one more time period) left in this halcyon time in their relationship before everything goes pear shaped. That’s not to say there won’t be _any_ angst in this next section, just that it’s in levels in keeping with the general secret relationship/pining/doomed lovers tone of the fic as a whole… and that I’m saving the big angst for a little later. If I manage to keep to the schedule that I’ve set for myself here, the sad parts should arrive in mid-December.  
> There is _not_ going to be a bittersweet ending here, though. I got rid of that fucking tag and schooched stuff around with the timeline so that it’ll end on a more hopeful note. Things won’t resolved completely until the end of the series, but there are no sad endings here, I promise.
> 
> If you jumped into reading this series beginning with the current work, or if you’ve read the other two but didn’t remember some of the specifics because it’s been a year or so, I hope the reference back to the first part of the series didn’t feel clunky or confusing. If you wanted to read/reread, Crowley made that promise to keep his head down during Armageddon in [Hot Days, Mad Blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20745212). That fic also contained their general conversation about Before, Aziraphale making the decision that he’s going to refuse to hurt Crowley when the End comes, and his attempts to make Crowley a little better at self-defense. In general, I try to write this series so that people can start reading at any point without needing to read every work that comes before, but they are all connected and I try to make the callbacks feel as natural as possible.
> 
> The every-two-weeks schedule seems to be working out okay! Unless something goes horribly wrong, I will be putting up chapter 14 next **Thursday, November 5th.** Remember that date. _Remember it._ You can catch preview posts for it on my tumblr every Wednesday.
> 
> Stay safe, stay funky, and if you’re in the US, pleasepleasepleaseplease make sure you vote. Peace out, friends.


	14. Restraint

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale seemed in no hurry to leave, taking his time with his breakfast and coffee as he slowly relaxed into a public-approved version of their friendship, chatting animatedly with Crowley about all the goings-on in Soho over the last three years. Crowley found himself relaxing, too, even though he still felt the time limit looming over them. He found he didn’t particularly want to bring it up yet, didn’t want to let that start to loom over Aziraphale, too. Talking with Aziraphale was one of the things he’d missed the most, and even though a large part of him wanted to surge across the table and snog the angel silly, he knew with a sharp kind of clarity that he’d be returning to Moscow tomorrow morning a happy demon no matter what. Even if they never touched once this whole visit, it was enough just to be here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know a lot of people are looking to avoid reading angst right now, and I **100% get it.** Personally, I’d rate this chapter pretty low on the angst scale compared to the fic as a whole, along with the 1820 section in general. There _is_ some angst and tension (see below), but mostly they’re getting settled into their relationship and really happy to see each other. If you'd rather save it for later, though, I completely understand.
> 
> **Content Notes:**  
>  Brief discussion of physical violence/abuse and minor injuries, which is downplayed by the person who got hurt. In case you want a context spoiler, I’ve explained what happened in more detail in the end note.  
> Discussion of how to avoid pressuring someone into having sex.  
> Canon-typical levels of Crowley being an overthinking dumbass.  
> Bringing in just a touch of kink, specifically light bondage and (extremely mild) power exchange. No one gets tied up or sexily bossed around until next chapter, but that is going to be one of the themes of this section of the fic. Please skip if you need to.
> 
> Chapter specific sex acts: None, but they’re beginning a kink negotiation conversation towards the end there.  
> Everyone stays clothed, so everyone’s genitals stay mysterious.

**Moscow, 1820**

It was trickier to get away this time than it had been in a while. For two decades now, Crowley had been—well, not _content,_ really, but at least not actively miserable—coasting along with his work schedule, stealing time in London when he was between assignments. Making excuses for more frequent visits but not pushing for them. He couldn’t risk letting his work slip. Couldn’t risk Hell catching on, wondering why he seemed intent on spending all his time in London. That meant that there was no real way to plan ahead. That meant being bound to the whims of their offices and taking what scraps of freedom he could find, whenever he could find them.

This all needed to have _the veneer of happenstance,_ as Aziraphale sometimes called it, though the veneer had grown remarkably thin these days. His visits England still varied in length (as long as he could get away with yet always shorter than he’d like) though Crowley would have to be willfully ignorant to miss the pattern. To not notice how the gaps in between were growing shorter and shorter, less than a year in between, almost always.

And then, just when his stupid heart had tricked his stupid brain into thinking Hell had mostly forgotten about him, he’d been sent off to Moscow and told to stir up trouble in the court of Alexander I. It was an open-ended assignment with only a few specific boxes to tick, and Hell seemed willing to let him shape the nature of his meddling more or less however he liked. All they’d asked was for him to sow distrust and paranoia between the increasingly superstitious Emperor and his supporters. Fifty years ago, it would have been exactly the sort of assignment Crowley would have jumped at. Flexible, not explicitly violent, done on his own terms, with limited interference from Downstairs… it would have been ideal. All he really had to do was lounge about looking good in those high collared coats and tight breeches, whisper a few words in the right ears, drink his body weight in alcohol, and get his reports in on time.

The only trouble was that he hadn’t gotten this assignment fifty years ago. He’d gotten it _three_ years ago, and had been stuck in Moscow ever since with no end date in sight. Further complicating things was the fact that, while Hell seemed willing to give him creative control over how he got his results, Crowley had been informed rather directly that this project was to be his top priority. No distractions. They wanted him to stay there posing as a human for as long as it took for their vague goals to be satisfied, and he knew they’d be displeased to discover he was letting anything else pull his focus.

He’d been stupid enough to ask earlier this year—face to face, no less, because his self-preservation instincts were apparently shriveled up and useless these days—if he could occasionally check in on the progress of his work in mass-production.

_“Your little vanity project can survive without you for a few years, Crowley,”_ Hastur had told him.

Thankfully, Crowley had walked away from that meeting mostly unscathed. No broken bones, barely bruised. That big slimy idiot did twist Crowley’s arm a bit there at the end, just as he’d been handing over his stack of forms, but all he’d gotten from it had been a minor sprain. Not a problem, really. Something he’d healed up without any fuss on his way out and then promptly ignored. It seemed like typical Hastur stuff, not anything too serious. Just the Duke trying to scare him, throwing his weight around a bit to put Crowley on edge and in his place for questioning orders. Orders Crowley would bet money Hastur himself didn’t understand. His suspicions didn’t seem to be raised, at least. Not about the Arrangement or London or any of the multitude of other secrets Crowley had up his sleeve. Besides, if Hastur had been _trying_ to injure him, Crowley would have known. All in all, not a bad day for Hell. He’d be fine.

Needless to say, though, requesting vacation time was clearly off the table. That meant that Crowley would need to—for once, since this whole Thing with the angel had started—plan his travel carefully and in advance. He wouldn’t have risked it ordinarily, would have just waited for a safer time, but this was no ordinary year, and he knew if he waited for Hell’s go-ahead to leave Russia, he’d miss his chance.

They used to go millennia without seeing one another. That had changed with the Arrangement, but even then, in its early days, the gaps between meetings could span decades. A hundred years after they first agreed to work together, Crowley tracked Aziraphale down with a few bottles of wine in tow.

_“Strictly a social call,”_ he’d said, _“Feel like celebrating.”_

Even though they’d gotten quite drunk, neither of them had mentioned what it was they were supposed to be celebrating. They never named it, not even eight hundred years on. Just one more unspoken thing buried between them. Crowley liked to think, though, that the angel knew what those visits meant.

It had been a way to establish a precedent, to ensure that he saw Aziraphale at least once every hundred years. No matter what they were doing or where they were, Crowley always made sure their paths crossed at some point during the twentieth year of each century. Crowley hadn’t missed a single one of these for six centuries running, not even during the bloody fourteenth century, and he wasn’t about to start now. Not when it felt like it maybe meant even more than it ever had before.

They never met up on the actual date, of course. Letting on that he paid attention that closely would be a bad look, though he of course remembered all the details of that original day with perfect recall. He remembered all the significant dates, including many that he thought would only be significant to himself. The humans kept changing the calendars, the fickle bastards, but Crowley never forgot. When the actual anniversary had come—early in the spring, sunny for Russia but so much colder than it had been all those years ago in Troia—Crowley celebrated eight hundred years of the Arrangement alone in his rooms. Nothing too taxing. Just a bottle of red, a bit sweeter than he normally drank it, and a leisurely wank.

Sneaking away for the actual visit took a bit more work, and he started planning months in advance. Even though Crowley could sense that he was the only supernatural being in the area, he knew that Hastur sometimes used humans as his eyes on Earth. If he couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t being watched by his own side’s agents, he couldn’t risk being gone long enough to arouse suspicion.

Right, so conventional methods of travel were out. He supposed he’d need to demonically miracle himself all the way across Europe—there _and_ back—which would expend a huge amount of energy. While Hell didn’t itemize its agents’ use of miracles, Crowley’s power did have finite limits. That meant he’d need to save up, spend a few days before and after conserving his miracles, and he wasn’t looking forward to that. He never felt so irritably helpless as he did when he had to do every tiny thing by hand like some kind of human.

The other tricky part was that Crowley also needed to be precise about how he timed his visit. If they were feeling particularly nosy, Hell would sometimes pull him Downstairs during his assignments to make him give an in-person progress report. Unscheduled summons like those were very rare—he’d only had the one in the last three years of being here—but it would be _disastrous_ if he missed one. Worse, still, if they realized he wasn’t there and came after him. Especially as Hastur had latched onto this assignment for some Satan-forsaken reason, he’d need to be careful. Crowley knew that the most likely time for a summons would be within a week or two after Hell received his monthly check-in form, so he’d couldn’t pick a date too early in the month. The last week of the month was out, too, as that was when they tended to send him the next month’s orders. It left him a narrow window, especially with the year drawing to a close.

The date he ended up picking was in the third week of November. He reached out to Aziraphale a few months early in the blind hope that the angel would be able to keep himself in London instead of fucking off to Prague or Dublin or bloody Boston on some errand for Heaven. Since his message would have to be mailed to Aziraphale’s business, Crowley drafted up his letter as though it were an inquiry from another bookseller looking to sell a collection of Russian poetry. He offered the time and location of their proposed meeting—a coffeehouse near Soho—as an invitation to an appraisal. For a moment, he’d considered posing as a customer, but in recent years the angel had grown so dragonish and defensive of his collection that Crowley had wondered, grinning, if Aziraphale would notice the handwriting before chucking such a letter into the fire. This cover story was better anyway, though, as it gave him an excuse to give the angel those poetry books without looking like a total sap.

Crowley waited out the spring and summer as patiently as he could, alternating between feeling so anxious that he thought his corporation might try to throw up and being so thrilled to see Aziraphale again that he feared he might actually start to fucking sing. Mostly, though, the waiting was just terribly boring. Getting the angel’s professional response—every bit as cagey as Crowley’s letter had been, and it always felt so good when Aziraphale played along—had been a bright spot. That had been one good day out of months spent filling out paperwork, killing time by wanking, and trying not to pull out his own hair. He only resisted the urge of the last one when it occurred to him that, with the nights growing longer and colder, he would need his hair for insulation.

The week before his trip passed with grating slowness as he conserved his power until, at long last, the day arrived. As Crowley was still the only demon in Moscow, and as he’d yet to meet a human here in the last three years who seemed perceptive enough to trouble him, he thought he could shave a little time off by leaving directly from his rooms in the palace.

It was just after breakfast when he locked himself in, though he was waiting to eat until after he arrived. After checking over his appearance for a third time, Crowley nudged the rug out of the way and gathered up the bundle of books wrapped in brown paper. He pulled up a fiery rope of power straight from Hell, and—

**London, about a second later**

—staggered to keep his balance on the muddy and uneven ground. He had been aiming for somewhere outside the city proper, just in case any other angels or demons were hanging about in London to notice that surge of infernal energy, but apparently, he’d landed in the middle of a field.

Thankfully, it was just now dawn in England, and another two hours before he was due to meet the angel. His boots and lower trousers were specked with muck, and everything smelled vaguely of brimstone and old eggs from teleporting like that, but he wouldn’t need to burn a miracle to clean up. One of his residences was nearby, and he could walk there, change clothes, and wash up.

He’d just need to remember to take all of his clothes off if they did anything today, as he didn’t want to take time away from the end of the visit to go change a second time. Crowley had done and re-done the math for what felt like a thousand times in the last few months, always hoping for a different answer. No such luck. No matter how he figured it, the most time he thought he could safely steal here in London was a day. Twenty-four hours. Dawn to dawn.

Nothing for it. He’d just have to make it work, somehow.

When the hour arrived and Crowley saw the angel in the doorway of the coffeehouse, saw those white-gold curls lit up by the weak early-morning sun, Crowley knew that all the planning and effort and waiting and risk had been worth it. Not that he’d ever doubted it, of course, but _seeing him again_ made him feel light and carefree in a way that no demon who had just teleported six thousand miles out from under the thumb of his murderous supervisors had any business feeling.

They did the usual routine at first, pretending to be mere acquaintances, but it twisted up Crowley’s wretched little heart something terrible to see the way Aziraphale’s eyes lit up around him. To watch how hard the angel was trying not to laugh and smile.

Aziraphale cooed over the books when he got them… before he remembered that he was supposed to be pretending to _buy_ them, not receive them as a present. The slip was covered up with a cough and a sheepish smile, and he resumed his usual fussy bookseller persona. “Mr. Fell” quoted him a price that Crowley truthfully didn’t know how to interpret—was it scandalously high, or insultingly low? How much did first editions go for in London these days? In turn, Crowley nodded very seriously and agreed to the sale. No handshake was offered, no contact at all, but Crowley found himself holding onto his knees with a white-knuckled grip at the way Aziraphale casually offered to _pay him back later, at the shop._

That was flirting, wasn’t it? More overt than anything the angel had ever done when they weren’t alone and mostly naked. Satan, but Crowley wanted to reach out and hold that pale, strong, soft hand. Kiss the back of it. Rub his face into the palm like a touch-starved tomcat. He didn’t, though. There were rules. _Don’t touch him in public, never in public._ He’d control himself and listen, wait for the angel to make the first move.

Aziraphale seemed in no hurry to leave, taking his time with his breakfast and coffee as he slowly relaxed into a public-approved version of their friendship, chatting animatedly with Crowley about all the goings-on in Soho over the last three years. Crowley found himself relaxing, too, even though he still felt the time limit looming over them. He found he didn’t particularly want to bring it up yet, didn’t want to let that start to loom over Aziraphale, too. Talking with Aziraphale was one of the things he’d missed the most, and even though a large part of him wanted to surge across the table and snog the angel silly, he knew with a sharp kind of clarity that he’d be returning to Moscow tomorrow morning a happy demon no matter what. Even if they never touched once this whole visit, it was enough just to be here.

It was that thought that solidified Crowley’s decision to keep the information about the deadline to himself, at least for now. If Aziraphale decided he wanted to get physical, Crowley didn’t want that to be because he’d intruded on the angel’s life and stuck him with a bloody time limit. There was a lot of pressure in that kind of disclosure. What kind of wanker disappears for three years and comes back expecting a shag, anyway? He worried that if he said, _“Hey, angel, I’m only here for just the one night, and I don’t know when I’ll be back,”_ it might push Aziraphale into having sex with him when he otherwise might not want to.

Crowley kept his secret successfully for several hours, well into the afternoon. It survived the rest of their coffeehouse breakfast, as well as the slow stroll they took around St. James’ Park. It did not, however, survive the walk back to the shop. They’d been talking about desserts, because of course they had, and Aziraphale had reacted in animated shock when Crowley admitted he’d never tried a madeleine.

“You simply must! They’re simply scrumptious,” He said, those gorgeous crinkles around his eyes. “There’s a little tearoom in Burlington Arcade I’ve been to recently that makes them. If you’d like, next week—Tuesday, perhaps?—we could go, and you can try some.”

Watching his feet, Crowley answered him in as casual a voice as he could manage. “M’afraid I’m booked solid next week.”

Undeterred, Aziraphale pressed on. “Well, whenever you’re free. I’m in no hurry.”

“It might be… a while.”

“That’s alright.” Aziraphale cocked his head. “Say, where are you staying this time? I could have a parcel of them sent to you at your lodgings for nibbles while you work. If you like them, we can visit the shop once you’re able. Perhaps stroll the gardens after...”

Crowley felt his mouth twitch into some kind of rigid grimace. For all that he hadn’t wanted to bring this up, he hadn’t been prepared to lie about it.

“You could send some, if you wanted,” he said carefully, pushing his hands deeper into his coat pockets. If he could just be smooth about this, he could make this an easy conversation. “I’d get the package in a few months. Bet they’d keep if you asked them not to go off. The address is still the same.”

“Still the same…?” Aziraphale repeated, pausing in the street. “You’re back at that walk-up over in Islington again?”

_Well, fuck._ This wasn’t going to be smooth _or_ easy, was it?

Crowley stopped walking, too. Shook his head. “Moscow.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it again as a frown drew across that expressive face. _Satan,_ but Crowley had missed seeing him.

As a sad, strained smile came to his lips, Aziraphale asked, “I take it you don’t mean that you’re staying on Moscow Road over in Bayswater.”

“Afraid not,” he answered, and managed something of a smile of his own.

_“Still?”_ Aziraphale asked, sounding incredulous. “It’s been three years.”

_As if I hadn’t been counting the days,_ Crowley thought.

“Yup.”

“How long is your break, then? It can’t…” The mental math Aziraphale was doing was written plainly across his face, as was his clear disappointment at the answers he seemed to be getting. Crowley could sympathize, having been let down by the exact same math as recently as that morning. “You can’t be planning to stay for very long if you don’t have a London address. When do you leave?”

Crowley ran a hand up the back of his neck, nudging his hat by mistake. “Er… Got a pocket watch on you, angel?”

Aziraphale gaped at him even as he pulled out his watch. “It’s half three. Crowley, why…?”

If he exhaled and said it quickly, perhaps this tense, public conversation would be over sooner. “Fifteen hours.” As the surprise in the angel’s expression shifted into something closer to anger, Crowley decided it might be for the best to try to break the tension with a joke. “Right, so if you wanted to get some madeleines, we should probably do it soon.”

“To Hell with the cakes!” Aziraphale snapped and turned on his heel to storm away, leaving Crowley blinking in his wake. That parcel of books, stripped of the brown paper now but still bundled up in twine, swung at his side as he marched down the street.

Crowley knew better than to try to follow—or at least he thought he did. He’d barely settled into a good mope about how spectacularly he’d fucked things up before Aziraphale spun back around, nearly to the end of the block, and called out to him.

“Well?” He asked. “Are you just going to stand there?”

Thankfully, Crowley had very long legs that occasionally liked to cooperate with him, and he put them to use all but jogging to catch up with the angel as he stalked towards the bookshop like it was the field of battle. For all Crowley knew, it might well be. There were customers waiting outside when they arrived, and Aziraphale didn’t even need to speak with them to get them to leave. Before they had even finished crossing the street, all human traffic on the pavement had diverted like water around a stone, seemingly without realizing why they’d given the shop at the corner such a wide berth.

Aziraphale unlocked the door and ushered Crowley inside ahead of himself with a curt nod. As he crossed the threshold, the curtains all swinging shut and the wards doubling in strength, Crowley mentally prepared for the angel to round on him and continue the argument they’d started out on the street. Instead, Aziraphale gathered him up in a tight embrace, right there between the front door and the archway to the shop floor.

“You are ridiculous,” the angel huffed, his face pressed against Crowley’s shoulder. The slightest bit tetchy, but gentle all the same.

Crowley had been longing to touch Aziraphale for hours, for _years,_ so having that barrier finally broken should have awakened in him some sense of passion, some desire to stumble back into the shop and drag the angel down with him. Instead, it overwhelmed him. His corporation rebelled against him, eyes burning behind his glasses, throat tightening, brain working at half speed to catch up with reality. To fully register the fact that this warm, strong, solid body in his arms was really there. That the scent filling his nose and coating his tongue—paper and leather, ozone and something that could have been vanilla—was more than just a dream.

“Yeah,” Crowley heard himself say, though he didn’t remember moving his lips to speak. Fuck, but his voice sounded rough. “Yeah. That’s fair.”

Somewhere in the last few moments, Aziraphale’s hat had vanished—Crowley’s too, probably relocated to the hat rack on the shop floor—and Crowley’s vision tightened until all he could see, all he could process, was that head of white-blond curls brushing his chin. He wanted to reach up and pet it, but his arms felt heavy and useless.

Aziraphale rose up on his tiptoes to close the slight distance between them in height and kissed him, sweet and slow and undemanding. Crowley felt himself unfreezing, felt his mind and his body start to work in synch. He could kiss back, at least. It was like a reflex now. Even if he couldn’t do anything else, even if he were asleep or in a coma or discorporated, he thought he’d probably be able to figure out how to kiss the angel if given half a chance.

_He’s kissing you like he missed you, too,_ some part of Crowley’s otherwise staticky mind supplied.

At some point, they stopped kissing, but Aziraphale didn’t break the embrace. He just sighed and pressed his face against the side of Crowley’s cheek. For a moment, it seemed like neither of them could say anything. Then, the angel spoke in a quiet voice right beside Crowley’s ear, no trace of anger left at all.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to,” Crowley promised, finally unfrozen enough to raise his arms to Aziraphale’s back and hold him. “Just… didn’t want you to be worrying about the time all day. Wanted it to be fun.”

Aziraphale laughed against his cheek and… no, it didn’t sound like a wet laugh, did it? Fuck, he did this in completely the wrong way. He never wanted to make the angel sad.

“Why did you let me prattle on about such nonsense all morning? You should have stopped me. We could have come straight here after breakfast.”

Crowley’s withered heart squeezed, and he pushed down the anger he felt whenever Aziraphale talked like that about himself. There was no way to address it without addressing the source, and Aziraphale never wanted to hear a bad word against the angels who taught him to make himself small.

“I forgot,” Crowley said instead, and it was very nearly the whole truth. “I was having fun. S’fun, talking to you like that.”

Aziraphale squeezed him tighter, then pressed a kiss to Crowley’s temple, right over his tattoo. Even when it was concealed by hair, Aziraphale knew exactly where it was. That felt significant, somehow, even if Crowley thought it probably shouldn’t.

As Aziraphale pulled back to look at Crowley in the face, he pointed out the change in hairstyle rather directly. “You’ve grown out your sideburns.”

“So have you.” Crowley brought up a hand to stroke the soft, pale curls growing in front of the angel’s ear. He’d been staring at them all morning. Any tiny change to the angel’s appearance was noteworthy and exciting.

“Only a little. I was afraid I’d look like a sheep if I grew mine all the way down… But I like yours.”

That made Crowley laugh, a sudden bark that sounded too loud in the quiet shop, but he didn’t care. “I’d like to see that. You should grow them out as much as you like. Guarantee that no matter how silly you think they look, there’s someone out there who wears theirs bigger and weirder.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes, slipping into a gorgeously catty tone of voice. “You have absolutely no idea. They’re catching on Upstairs.”

“Oh?” Crowley pressed, kissing Aziraphale’s forehead. They parted, and Aziraphale led them onto the shop floor hand-in-hand—a very good thing, in Crowley’s opinion. Now that they’d touched again, he didn’t know if he’d be able to stop.

“There’s someone—and no, I won’t tell you who it is, so don’t ask me, you wicked serpent,” Aziraphale continued with a breathless grin. He slipped his hand free for just a moment to wiggle his fingers on either side of his face like some kind of lizard frill. “The style he’s chosen stands out several inches on either side. Stiff. They don’t have hair product Up there, so I’m sure he miracles it. I just cannot figure out _why.”_

“Threat display,” Crowley responded sagely, taking Aziraphale’s hand back when he was offered it. “Probably puffing himself up bigger to frighten away any demons he meets.”

The angel collapsed back into Crowley’s arms, laughing like he didn’t have a single care in the world. Crowley realized he was grinning, too, wide enough that his cheeks hurt. It probably looked unnatural on his face, given how much time he spent keeping such open enjoyment out of his expression, but Crowley couldn’t stop himself.

_Three years._ It had been three years since he’d held this angel in his arms, three years since he got to hear him laugh.

It had been so comfortable the last time, back before Crowley had been ripped away. Six months, nearly, that last visit. They met multiple times a week, sometimes several days running. It hadn’t been safe, but _fuck,_ Crowley could get used to living like that. The world outside had been miserable and wet, the air itself so heavy with ash, in that frozen summer that had bled into a frozen winter without any care for normal weather patterns. Safe and warm and happy inside the bookshop, Crowley had barely noticed any of it.

Crowley had lived on Earth for six thousand years, hopping from place to place on the whims of Hell until it could be fairly said that he’d lived _everywhere._ He’d tried not to dwell on it, as it was the kind of thought that wouldn’t do much beyond encourage his already silly heart to act up, but walking through the bookshop doors today had felt more like coming home than any place he’d ever been.

There was something close to wonder in Aziraphale’s expression, and some voice inside Crowley told him he should drop to his knees in reverence, turn his face away from that beautiful, impossible thing. Such a sight was surely too holy for someone like him to behold, couldn’t _really_ be meant for him. As much as he loved this, missed it, _craved it…_ there was a part of him that longed to hide from this kind of gentle affection.

He couldn’t kneel, though. Not when those strong, soft arms were wrapped so snugly around his waist, holding him up like a drunk in need of balance. Not when his own arms were thrown around the angel’s broad shoulders, his fingers trailing over the luxurious fabric of his coat. He could close his eyes, though, as he watched the space between their faces shrink and shrink away to nothing. Some things were better felt than seen, anyway.

Crowley could taste the coffee on Aziraphale’s lips as the angel kissed him. Right there on the shop floor, standing right on the edge of the rug that hid Heaven’s sigil from human eyes. He was holding on to Crowley’s hips with those wide hands of his, pressing their bodies together as he gathered up fistfuls of Crowley’s coat, and Crowley went willingly. Aziraphale’s tongue was a question against his lips and Crowley answered with the kind of enthusiasm humans usually only showed for the sight of an oasis in a desert, opening his parched mouth and drinking his fill.

_It’s been three years,_ he thought, and then corrected himself. _It’s_ only _been three years._

How the Hell did he survive all those centuries without touching him at all?

They were drifting, Crowley noticed—somehow able to notice things, even through the heat of the kiss and the arousal simmering low in his own body—around the perimeter of the rug and back towards that spiral staircase… with all that that entailed. His conscience was nudging at him, muffled but insistent, and he managed to pull away. This shouldn’t ever be something they drift into, he thought. Aziraphale deserved better than some stumbling, fumbling fuck.

“What d’you want, angel?” Crowley murmured against Aziraphale’s lips. He felt them smile.

“Some combination of alcohol, sex, and conversation, ideally.” Each word was punctuated with a kiss, and then the angel leaned back to look at him, eyes half-lidded and grinning. “And you? What do you want, Crowley?”

Crowley chose his words carefully, desperate to get this part out right. “Are you sure? Don't want you to feel like we're... that the sex is a requirement. Just because I'm only here for the one night.”

Aziraphale frowned, then his expression softened. “I don't feel that way at all. I was planning to ask you upstairs even before I knew how soon you had to leave.”

Relief bloomed in his chest, quickly followed by excitement. “It doesn't change anything?”

“Not about that, no.”

“Oh. Well, in that case. Lead on.”

For a few steps, Aziraphale did just that, taking Crowley towards the stairs by the hand. Then he paused, looked back over his shoulder with his mouth set like he was about to ask a question. Whatever it was, though, Aziraphale stopped himself from saying it.

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing. There's nothing wrong.” Aziraphale shook his head, still smiling but clearly trying to process something. “I still absolutely want to take you upstairs, I just... realized I need to adjust my approach somewhat.”

“Adjust it how?”

“It's not a problem at all.” He waved his free hand like he was shooing the thought away. “I had just… planned to ask you about something I'd thought about trying, but I’m realizing that it’s probably better to wait and ask when we have more time.”

Crowley's mind boggled with the potential implications of that statement. What the devil could Aziraphale possibly be considering _trying_ that would take more than fifteen hours?

“What did you want to ask?”

The angel shook his head and smiled. “Later, darling. I'd rather stick to what we're used to than spend too much time discussing hypotheticals.”

“Aziraphale,” he said, completely aware that he was shamelessly whining. “Angel. If you don't explain what you're talking about here, I need you to know that I will _literally_ die of curiosity. Just keel over, deceased. Right next to your Milton first editions.”

“Really,” Aziraphale said, and clicked his tongue. “There's no need to be so dramatic. It's just... well, you raised a good point. I wouldn't want you to feel like you owed it to me to make a choice under such a short time limit, or feel pushed to agree. I'd like you to have the chance to think it over first.”

While Crowley was reasonably certain that there was absolutely nothing Aziraphale could ask for that he wouldn’t want, perhaps even more desperately, his mind reeled with the possibilities. It seemed like it must be something sexual—it could be something taboo by human standards, or maybe something that would be tricky for them in their specific situation, either physiologically or within the confines of their roles. No matter what it was, though, Crowley couldn’t stop thinking about it. His mind felt like a shawl snagged on a nail, trapped and unravelling away from anything that wasn’t that singular, unknowable point of mystery. If he didn’t get some kind of answer, he’d pull himself completely apart.

“I'm a very fast thinker. Promise,” he wheedled. “But I can't _start_ thinking about it unless you tell me.”

Aziraphale leveled a flat gaze at him for a moment, then sighed. “If you insist,” he said, tugging Crowley by the hand away from the spiral staircase and towards the side room with the sofa and desk. “But if you're going to _think about it,_ I'd rather we had that conversation down here instead of in the bedroom.”

“Fine by me,” Crowley said, dropping onto the sofa as Aziraphale arranged himself in the desk chair.

“I’m afraid you may have built this question up a bit more in your imagination than it deserves, my dear,” Aziraphale said with a sigh. “It really is a very small thing.”

“Start at the beginning,” Crowley prompted, trying to act like he wasn’t about to vibrate out of his skin with anticipation.

Aziraphale slapped his hands down on the tops of his thighs and huffed out a breath. “Well… I suppose to start at the _beginning_ would be to say that I have been… doing some reading. While you’ve been gone.”

The slight flush coloring the angel’s cheeks was really going to do him in, wasn’t it?

Crowley had always known that Aziraphale had something of a not-so-secret interest in risqué literature, and he’d always enjoyed teasing the angel whenever he caught him with his nose in that sort of a book. He’d even seen some recently, as he’d taken to snooping through the shop’s collection when Aziraphale was busy with customers and left Crowley to entertain himself. In all his snooping, though, he couldn’t remember finding anything that was so salacious Aziraphale would need to sit him down on the sofa to break the news to him. There were a few academic texts, maybe. Some vaguely racy novels that would only offend the sensibilities of people _looking_ to get upset about something.

Then again, Crowley had learned first-hand that Aziraphale was disturbingly good at hiding things that might arouse suspicion. Things like his surprisingly comprehensive collection of sex toys. Crowley hadn’t known that such a collection even existed until the angel offered to introduce him to it rather personally. Theoretically, he could have _anything_ stashed away in this bookshop of his.

…Of course, there was a difference between realizing that fact and _understanding_ that fact. Just at that moment, Crowley found himself burning with the desire to snoop through this whole shop and find what _specifically_ Aziraphale had read. Discover what kinds of books lit up the angel’s imagination and kept his mind—and hands—busy while Crowley was away. He also might have wanted to be sat right here on the sofa, or upstairs at Aziraphale’s feet while he sat in his armchair, and be made to listen while Aziraphale read every blessed volume of it out loud.

Pushing aside his anxious yet pornographic inner monologue, Crowley leaned forward in his seat and said, “Go on.”

It sounded calm and collected, and the lecherousness in his voice seemed to be at situationally appropriate levels. He was almost proud of himself. Almost.

“I am not trying to push for us to try this today,” Aziraphale said, not quite looking at Crowley as his fingers drummed on his knees. “Or ever, if it isn’t something you want. But I have _heard_ that this is something that some of the humans have found to be… pleasurable. It has, at least, piqued my curiosity.”

“Consider mine _incredibly_ piqued as well,” Crowley said, and to his credit, it didn’t come out as a growl like he’d been worried it might. Gosh, he was nailing this communication thing tonight.

“How would you feel about restraints?” Aziraphale looked back up at him, then, and the heat in his gaze lit Crowley up from within.

“Restraints,” Crowley repeated, his mouth suddenly feeling very dry. “What do you mean by that?” He was surprised at how evenly he asked the question.

Though his face was still pink, Aziraphale’s smile started to shape itself into something more confident. Something more conspiratorial. “I’ve thought a lot about it, Crowley. I’d quite like to know what it feels like to be, well… To be tied up. Bound.” He leaned over, reached for Crowley’s hand where it dangled over the armrest. Took it in both of his own and squeezed. “To be the slightest bit helpless.”

Crowley felt like he’d been hurled back into the past, a nearly thirty-year-old memory coming back to him in shattered, vivid pieces. The stench of blood and rot in the streets, overlaid by the smell of the perfume in Aziraphale’s hair. Pink and cream satin. Snow-white lace. The angel’s calves in those stockings. How clean his hands had been, even in such a filthy place.

At the very center of the memory were those heavy iron chains… and the bruises they had concealed.

“Oh,” Crowley said, eyes drawn involuntarily to the angel’s wrists.

He knew his face must be screamingly red, knew his heart must be pounding loud enough to be heard all the way across Soho. Somehow, out of all the possibilities he’d considered, he’d failed to consider that Aziraphale might be about to ask him _that._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Context Spoiler:**  
>  Crowley remembers an incident in Hell where Hastur twisted his arm and sprained his wrist. He describes it as “not serious” / “not a bad day for Hell,” because it could have been much worse.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Weird coincidence:** When I was fooling around looking at distances between London and Moscow, Google kept suggesting that perhaps I meant Moscow Road in London, so that became Aziraphale’s sad little joke when he found out where Crowley was staying. I later did some super basic research to make sure Moscow Road didn’t get named that a century later than this scene or something. _As it turns out,_ it got named that sometime in the five years immediately preceding this scene, possibly in honor of Emperor Alexander I’s visit to the area—the same guy that Crowley’s been messing with for Hell. That has absolutely no bearing on anything plot-wise, but I thought it was neat.  
> The desserts Aziraphale wanted Crowley to try are English madeleines ([these little dudes](https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/english-madeleines)). They’re originally a French dish, and _those_ little dudes are shaped like seashells. I’m sure our angel enjoys those, too, but I wanted him to suggest something very fussy looking, and from what I was able to see online, English madeleine recipes were available starting from around this time period. Those fancy new treats, made by some fancy teahouse near the recently constructed Burlington Arcade, would be something he might be interested in showing his dearest friend now that he’s back in town.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Chapter 15 will be going up in two weeks on **November 19th**. I post previews every Wednesday on my tumblr for WIP Wednesdays.
> 
> Hang in there, y’all. We can and we will survive the rest of 2020, if for no other reason besides spite. <3


	15. Cautious Hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale denied himself things he wanted. Things he needed, things that made life just a touch more comfortable. And sometimes, it looked an awful lot like he was punishing himself on purpose.
> 
> Hell had done a fucking number on Crowley’s head for sure, but he at least didn’t do their job for them. If they wanted him tortured, they needed to do it themselves, and when they did, Crowley never deluded himself into thinking it was because they _cared._ It was Hell, and he was a demon, so there was a certain amount of inevitability to the cruelty… but it wasn’t—it wasn’t something he really believed he’d _earned._ Even all this time later, the unfairness of it all almost felt like a comfort. It was probably just stubborn, stupid pride, but it felt like proof that no matter what they did to him, there were parts of him they couldn’t touch. Proof that if he still believed it wasn’t _right_ for them to hurt and demean him, then they hadn’t really gotten to him. That even if they owned the rest of him, they at least didn’t own the inside of his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You don’t want to know how many times I looped the song, [Hit the Back](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyFsbYSajhs) by King Princess while writing this.  
> There is ART for this chapter, y’all! It was drawn by the wonderfully talented Sungmee, and you can find it linked at the top of today’s ridiculously massive endnote.
> 
>  **Content Notes:**  
>  Brief mention of Crowley’s past sex partners/some of the issues related to sex with humans in general (as a point of comparison).  
> Crowley has some kind of messy and anxious thoughts about bondage as it relates to consent issues and the idea of sex being used as a form of self-harm, though in talking it out with Aziraphale he’s able to settle those fears. To confirm, he absolutely is NOT talked into having sex he doesn’t want, but they do find a way to make it work for both of them.  
> In general, there’s just a lot of anxiety and nervousness and insecurity on his part about making mistakes during sex.
> 
> Specific sex acts: okay, so they aren’t ACTUALLY banging YET, but there’s so much kink negotiation, sexy talk, people being tied up, and weird non-contact foreplay happening that I feel hesitant to say that there is NO sex happening in this chapter.  
> Penises for everyone! Also, heads up for light bondage and mild power play.

Possibly as many as three seconds passed before Crowley was able to respond, but the speed of his thoughts made it feel like it had taken much longer.

Crowley was a demon of the world, so _of course_ he knew that there were humans that were into that sort of thing, that whole business about getting tied up. Naturally, though, he’d never personally partaken in it. All his past dalliances had either been for work or for stress relief, and he’d been hesitant to do anything that might make those encounters more complicated or time-consuming than they already were.

The idea of tying up a human he was looking to shag hadn’t ever sounded appealing to him, even back in the days when he could stomach the idea of shagging a human at all. It reminded him too much of some of the things one might see Downstairs in Torments. Especially since it felt a bit… ethically tangly. Crowley was a powerful immortal with the ability to shape reality to his will, and the humans he’d been with were, uh. Human. Powerless, fragile mortals. No need to add any additional power discrepancies into the mix, thank you very much. And the reverse? Asking some human to tie him down and fuck him? Ridiculous. Absolutely not. The thought had literally never occurred to him.

But outside of what it might mean for a human, had he ever _thought about it?_ Well… yes. Of course he had. Conceptually, at least. Crowley was a nearly-six-thousand-year-old chronic overthinker. He always thought about everything, and usually to excess. Under certain specific, decidedly inhuman, circumstances it sounded… somewhat interesting. This wasn’t a thought he’d ever _seriously_ considered, though, not enough to develop a—a preference, or anything like that.

Idle thoughts, though? Well. One could waste a lot of time on silly, idle thoughts.

No, until this moment, this had seemed even more unlikely than the rest of the unlikely things that had happened between himself and Aziraphale. The idea that the angel—his angel, Principality Aziraphale, Guardian of the Bloody Eastern Gate—might approach him and say, _“Oh, Crowley! I thought I might enjoy being trussed up and ravished today, does that fit your schedule?”_ …It was an idea that existed strictly in the realm of impossibility, until quite suddenly it didn’t anymore.

The thing was, the terrible, awful truth of it, was that Crowley wanted to say yes. Agree to this whole deranged plan the angel had come up with, right then and there, without any further discussion. He really, _really_ wanted to say yes. Not just because he was ready to trip over himself to give Aziraphale whatever he wanted, _especially_ when it came to sex… though that was definitely part of the appeal. But another part of it was simply down to his own desires, his own endless appetites. An angel— _his angel_ —bound willingly for the pleasure of a demon? It felt so maddeningly, sensually blasphemous he thought the image would be seared into the backs of his eyelids for the rest of his bloody life.

More than that, though, was the raw fucking _trust_ it implied. Forget angels, forget demons, this was individual. Personal. This would be Aziraphale saying, so much deeper than any words could, that he trusted Crowley with something important. Trusted him to keep him safe, trusted him to treat him well. To give him everything he wanted. And wasn’t that, when he got right down to it, the thing _Crowley_ had always wanted more than anything else?

He just… had no idea what he’d ever done to _earn_ that trust. Crowley certainly didn’t trust himself with this, not with something so fragile. Something he wanted so desperately.

That’s why he couldn’t just say yes, not without talking about this first. Talking things out first was never his strong suit. Words in general weren’t, really. But he had to—had to get this right. Couldn’t let his own fathomless neediness take over, or he risked taking too much. Risked… risked hurting Aziraphale.

Because that was the other thing, wasn’t it? The angel didn’t exactly have a great track record for looking out for himself. Paris had proved that well enough. He hadn’t ever found out _why_ the angel had been such a state in Paris that he’d let himself get captured by a bunch of angry humans, why he’d let them rough him up and throw him in a filthy dungeon and why he maybe would have let them cut off his beautiful, stupid head…

Aziraphale had promised him that he hadn’t ever intended to get discorporated in Paris that day, promised that if Crowley hadn’t saved him, he would have saved himself. Crowley had to believe him, had to take him on— _eugh_ —on faith, because the alternative was just too much to think about. But the point was, the angel let himself get hurt sometimes. He denied himself things he wanted. Things he needed, things that made life just a touch more comfortable. And sometimes, it looked an awful lot like he was punishing himself on purpose.

Hell had done a fucking number on Crowley’s head for sure, but he at least didn’t do their job for them. If they wanted him tortured, they needed to do it themselves, and when they did, Crowley never deluded himself into thinking it was because they _cared._ It was Hell, and he was a demon, so there was a certain amount of inevitability to the cruelty… but it wasn’t—it wasn’t something he really believed he’d _earned._ Even all this time later, the unfairness of it all almost felt like a comfort. It was probably just stubborn, stupid pride, but it felt like proof that no matter what they did to him, there were parts of him they couldn’t touch. Proof that if he still believed it wasn’t _right_ for them to hurt and demean him, then they hadn’t really gotten to him. That even if they owned the rest of him, they at least didn’t own the inside of his head.

It seemed to be different with Aziraphale, though. Those fuckers didn’t seem to be hurting the outside of him—thank… thank Someone for that, at least—but they definitely had set up camp inside the angel’s mind. When Heaven came down on Aziraphale, the angel seemed to believe he deserved it. When they didn’t, when he got away with something that he felt like he shouldn’t have, sometimes the angel was willing to pick up Heaven’s slack himself.

Crowley wanted—needed—was bloody _obligated_ to make sure this was really something Aziraphale wanted. That he wasn’t trying to use Crowley as a way to hurt himself again. A—a fucking way to self-flagellate, to pour salt in some wound he wouldn’t let himself heal. An angel willingly bound for the pleasure of a demon… a lot could go wrong there. _To be the slightest bit helpless,_ Aziraphale had said when he described what he wanted out of this. Crowley didn’t like the sound of that.

On a purely intellectual level, he knew Aziraphale was tough, even by angelic standards. Knew he’d been built that way, built to be durable and strong. But Crowley also knew that, as a demon, he’d been built a certain way, too. Built to hurt people, to cause pain and bring ruin. He’d rather spend the rest of his eternal life never touching Aziraphale again than let his be a touch that hurt him. Rather cut off his own damned hands if it came down to it.

Right. So… talking about it. That was—that was a thing that needed to happen. And he thought better when he was moving, better than he did when he was stuck frozen in place running through every worst-case scenario inside his own fucking head and _not saying a single word out loud._

Fuck, Aziraphale probably thought he’d broken him or something. Or that he was angry at being asked. That wouldn’t do either. He pushed himself up to a standing position, dimly registering the look of surprise on the angel’s face at the sudden movement.

“Let me… let me just think this over for a moment,” Crowley said, pacing what little floorspace there was back here. Just from the edge of the sofa, past the desk, taking a turn near the chessboard, and back he was back again. There wasn’t far to go, but by Satan, he was going to walk the distance.

“By all means. Take your time. You don’t have to give me your answer today,” Aziraphale said, his voice mild. “Or ever. It was simply an idea, not a demand.”

“I’m not saying no,” he corrected quickly, holding up his hands as if to stop that thought right where it stood. When was the last time he’d said _no,_ anyway, when it was something in his power to give? Of course, it wasn’t _his_ power that would be up for grabs here…

He shook his head and continued. “I’m not. I just want to ask… why?”

Aziraphale answered immediately. Smoothly, like it was rehearsed. “I’ve read about it, and I’m curious if I would like it. By all accounts, it’s supposed to be enjoyable for all parties involved.” He smiled, easy and calm. “It sounds like it would be fun.”

Crowley wanted to be irritable. He wanted to snap back and ask, _Was it fun for you last time? Sitting there all pretty and chained up? Was it fun enough to die for?_

He _had_ been pretty, though, chains and all. Crowley would be a fucking liar if he said he hadn’t incorporated the image into his rotation of shameful wank fodder.

Those fantasies usually came in one of two flavors. In the first kind (the pathetic kind), the Aziraphale of his imagination was so happy to see Crowley that he shagged him right there in the cell, not caring that he was somewhere filthy and public and dangerous. He’d act like he didn’t even remember that he was bound.

In the second kind (the really pathetic kind), Crowley would stride right into that prison cell, confident and brave and cool, and he’d rescue the angel. He’d unlock Aziraphale’s chains, and Aziraphale would—would look at him. Look at him like he’d just had a revelation, like he understood all at once why Crowley did it. Like he understood what it all meant. And he’d—he’d take off Crowley’s glasses, and snog him silly. They’d fuck in those fantasies, too, of course. Crowley did understand how wanking worked. It wasn’t just emotional masochism, as some kind of physical climax tended to be a prerequisite. But it wasn’t the point.

Just like the chains weren’t the point. They weren’t the draw. They were either something to be forgotten in the heat of the moment, proof of how much Aziraphale wanted him… or they were a confession to be accepted.

In those fantasies, Aziraphale was never bruised. He had been in reality. Bruises on the swell of bone at his wrists. Skin broken where it had been rubbed and chafed and abused by too-small cuffs and too-rough humans who wanted to do a lot more than bruise him.

In reality, Crowley had rescued him, but he hadn’t felt very cool or brave or confident. He’d felt like he’d gotten lucky, had gotten there in time to prevent something awful from happening to his best friend, but he also couldn’t stop thinking about how Aziraphale _shouldn’t have been there at all._ Human beings shouldn’t chain up angels. They shouldn’t bruise them. Aziraphale had _promised him_ that he wouldn’t have let them kill him, but the fact that it had fallen to him—a demon, not even another bloody angel—to free him felt… wrong. There had been something very, very wrong that day. Aziraphale had been in distress somehow, had needed saving from something bigger than humans and their killing machines, and for all his luck, Crowley hadn’t been able to do a thing to save him from whatever had really driven him there.

Of course, they had fucked afterwards in reality, too. Gotten sloppy drunk, sobered up, and shagged on the floor of Crowley’s inn room in Montmartre. He still counted those hours as some of the best in his entire damned life. And even better, Aziraphale had liked it enough to keep doing it. Had proposed this whole bloody add-on to their Arrangement. Everything just the same as it always had been, only in addition to swapping blessings and temptations they swapped turns for who got to rail the other over a desk that week. Everything he could ever hope to ask for and more.

But those other fantasies still persisted, because even though Crowley had gotten _everything,_ it wasn’t enough. There had been no moment of clarity, no epiphany where Aziraphale had realized how much he mattered. How much he was loved. Aziraphale hadn’t seen anything in Crowley’s eyes because he _hadn’t wanted to see his eyes at all._ And the angel been so hurt, and so fragile, even after the bruises faded like a bad memory. He’d kissed Crowley, and Crowley had been quietly terrified for the last three decades that he’d kissed him as a favor, or—or some kind of a transaction. Like Crowley had needed a reward for doing the bare fucking minimum in keeping Aziraphale’s head on his shoulders.

And here he was, going on thirty years later, asking Crowley to be the one to put the ropes back on.

“Right,” Crowley said at last, sinking down onto the sofa. He wanted to say yes, he really did. If there was a way to do it safely, he _really_ wanted to find it. “Talk me through it. I want to know—ah, which parts of this you’re thinking would be fun. And then I’ll… try to figure out how to make it happen.”

Aziraphale gave a happy wiggle in his seat, nearly killing Crowley on the spot. “Well, there’s the novelty factor, for one. New things can be quite thrilling.”

“Right.”

“And it’s about the power dynamics, of course. It’s about giving up control willingly. I want to try turning the reigns over to you, so to speak.”

Crowley scrubbed a hand across his face. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of. “You’d be putting yourself completely at my mercy.”

He watched as Aziraphale’s hands gripped at the fabric of his trousers over his thighs. “I know,” he said, heat threaded through his voice.

“I’m a demon, Aziraphale. We aren’t known for our mercy.”

At that, Aziraphale shivered—literally fucking _shivered._ “Is that a promise?”

“Angel,” Crowley said, and he hated the cringe that must have shown on his face.

Aziraphale’s expression closed, became withdrawn and apologetic. “Of course, I’m… I’ve made a mess of this, haven’t I? I shouldn’t have brought it up. It was more of a—a passing curiosity, really. Please. Forget I mentioned it.”

“Don’t. Don’t—don’t do that. It’s an interesting idea, and I can…” Crowley sighed. “I can really see where the appeal is. I just…”

“Yes?”

Crowley had a sudden image of himself, walking slowly out onto the surface of a frozen lake. The first good, hard freeze of autumn, the depth of the ice untested and uncertain… but still so smooth and shiny and inviting. He wanted to get across, _needed_ to get across, but he could already hear the ice creaking beneath his feet.

All he had to do was explain himself and why he was hesitating… without making Aziraphale feel like there was something wrong with him for bringing this up. Without implying that his concern ran deeper than it should for a pair of friends twenty-nine years deep into a secret, vigorously sexual affair. Without pressing too sharply on those raw nerves so close to the surface of the angel’s skin and trying to force him to confront Heaven’s cruelty before he’s ready. All while distracted by his own anxieties and the burgeoning stiffy in his trousers.

Easy, right?

Well. In a way, it kind of… was. At least, it seemed easier than other tense talks he’d had to give over the centuries. And this was _Aziraphale_ he was talking to, not one of his supervisors. If the angel spotted any inconsistencies in his story, he seriously doubted that Aziraphale would decide to stab him.

He took a deep breath, then looked the angel in the eyes. “I am interested. I just… I wanted to make sure that I knew what you wanted out of this, first. And I wanted to make sure you knew what you wanted, too.” Crowley shrugged, splayed his fingers across the tops of his thighs. “Seems like the kind of thing where someone could accidentally get hurt, you know?”

Understanding lit up the angel’s face. “You’re worried about hurting me while I’m restrained?”

“Yeah,” he said through a throat that somehow felt like he’d just finished using it to swallow sand. Fuck, but he wasn’t built for such long stretches of sustained emotional honestly. Between that and the teleporting miracle this morning, Crowley felt a bit like he’d been scrubbed raw.

“Is that… your only reservation?”

Crowley, to his credit, really did think about his answer instead of blurting out something hasty. There had been quite a few disturbing thoughts that had occurred to him when he first heard the angel’s suggestion, but… well. When he lined all those fears up side-by-side to compare them, he found that on some level, that was what all them had really been about. The fear of hurting Aziraphale, or letting Aziraphale hurt himself.

“Other than that, I suppose I’m all for it. But it’s…” He trailed off, would-be words mangled by indecision. Finally, he managed something close to what he was trying to get at. “It isn’t some trivial concern. It’s serious.”

The expression on Aziraphale’s face was unbearably fond, so much so that Crowley had to fight the urge to say something waspish just to get a moment’s respite. “I never thought it was trivial, my dear. But I think… I think I might like to try to put your mind at ease.”

Crowley fidgeted a bit in his seat, shifting further back into the couch to get comfortable. “Alright. Go on, then.”

That soft smile hardened, sharpened, as Aziraphale seemingly considered his options. “Crowley, I’d like to show you something,” he said a moment later, standing up. Crowley moved to follow suit, but was waved off. “No, no. That’s quite alright. Stay right where you are.”

He settled back against the sofa, not sure what to do with his hands. His pulse quickened as Aziraphale took off his coat and draped it over the back of his chair. He held his breath as Aziraphale pushed up his sleeves, not with the careful folding-up that was his norm, but instead baring his pale-haired forearms in two shocking, rough bursts of motion. That seemed to be all the undressing the angel had planned for the moment, though. Aziraphale raised his arms over his head, stretched them across his chest one after another, then shook the tension out of them as he bounced on the balls of his feet.

“Alright, I’m ready,” he said, looking at Crowley expectantly. “I’d like you to please produce some rope.”

_“What?”_

“Any kind will do, though preferably I’d like to try this with the kind you would feel most comfortable using to bind my hands were you to decide you were interested in trying this in a sexual capacity.”

“This… wouldn’t be a sexual capacity, then?” Crowley asked, his mouth strangely dry even as he repeated the angel’s ridiculous phrasing.

There was a smug, bastard look in Aziraphale’s eyes. “No, dear boy. This is a demonstration.”

Crowley looked down at his hands in his lap. There was a bundle of red silk rope there, innocent looking in its tidy coils for all it felt like he was holding his own squirming guts in his palms. He didn’t even remember performing the miracle to create it.

“Beautiful,” Aziraphale declared. “And so soft and smooth.”

He stepped closer, their shoes mingling at the foot of the sofa, and held his hands out in front of Crowley. Wrist folded over wrist. Hands held in loose fists. Offering them—offering _himself._ Crowley was frozen.

“Bind my hands, please,” Aziraphale directed.

His tone was gentle, but it was enough to shock Crowley into action. Crowley loosened the rope where it was bundled tight around itself, and with hands that _did not shake,_ he started to wrap those vivid coils around Aziraphale’s pale, steady arms.

“Good,” the angel said. “Nice and snug, please. I’d like this to be very secure.”

Under Aziraphale’s watchful eye, Crowley did as he was bid. He used the full length of rope, tugging each loop tighter than he thought he should whenever the angel nodded to him to pull harder, his eyes fixed on the way the rope bit into Aziraphale’s flesh like a sin. He tied the ends off and pulled his hands back into his own lap.

Aziraphale gave a few tugs on the bindings, testing the hold. It looked as though he could barely move his hands. He smiled.

“Perfect,” he said. “Though, if I could ask you for one more favor…?”

“Anything.”

“You’ve chosen a rather slick rope—which is perfectly fine. This feels very luxurious, actually. But I’d like to ask if you would mind terribly using a bit of your power on the knot to make sure it doesn’t slip loose?”

Crowley’s fingers twitched and it was done. Aziraphale tugged again, a bit harder the second time. The knot wouldn’t budge for anything short of another minor miracle.

“Thank you, my dear. Now. Are you watching?”

When Crowley nodded, Aziraphale stepped back. He straightened to his full height, squared his shoulders like the steel-spined soldier he was built to be. His hands went up to his chest, and all the warning Crowley got was a cheeky little bloody wink before Aziraphale wrenched his arms apart and shredded through the rope like it was made of nothing stronger than frayed twine. The knot, still tied, fell to the floor along with half of the rope. Aziraphale stepped over the mess like an afterthought and dropped the remaining scraps back into Crowley’s lap.

The angel leaned down, tipped up Crowley’s chin with fingers that were shockingly gentle in the wake of that display of destructive strength, and planted a kiss on his lips. Crowley had been fighting back confused, uncomfortable arousal since he’d first heard Aziraphale’s proposal. Watching him casually tear through his bindings like a human might break a spiderweb had lit a spark in him, but that _kiss._ That kiss was like a rush of oxygen feeding that spark into a blaze. When Aziraphale broke away, Crowley was already gasping.

“I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again, as many times as you need to hear it,” Aziraphale murmured against Crowley’s heated skin. “You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. You can’t hurt me unless I let you. And you can’t bind me unless I want to be bound.”

Crowley turned his face, pressed his lips against the warm skin of Aziraphale’s wrist. Softly, as softly as he could, he placed a kiss there. He hesitated a moment before opening his eyes again, half afraid that if he looked, he would find himself eye level with fresh bruises.

There were warm pink lines where the ropes had crossed and broken free, superficial like the creases pressed into a cheek by a pillow after a long sleep. As he watched, they faded into nothingness, and he could tell it wasn’t down to miraculous healing. There were no bruises. No scrapes. As far as he could tell, not even any pain.

“If you don’t want to try it, we won’t,” Aziraphale told him, and Crowley could tell that it was a promise. “But my dearest. A bit of rope won’t cause you to hurt me. I’d feel just as safe trying this as I do every other occasion when we’ve had sex.”

“Oh,” Crowley said, shifting his gaze up to the angel’s face.

Aziraphale smiled at him, stroked his cheekbone with a thumb.

“The ropes are a symbol. They can’t really hold me down. That wasn’t ever the real appeal for me, anyway.”

“Right. So then… what is?”

“I’d like to feel them against my skin. To watch you tie them in place… especially since the rope you’ve chosen is so pretty.” Another agonizingly tender caress to his cheek. “To… remind myself that I’m _choosing_ to hand control over to you. Do you understand?”

Crowley still felt like he was burning, but he knew he still needed to get one more point across. “I don’t… I don’t want to take your choices away, Aziraphale.”

“Is that what you feel I’ve done to you all these years?”

“What?”

“Whenever we have sex, I can’t help but notice that you seem to let me take the initiative, as it were. After nearly thirty years, I get the feeling that it must be at least partially intentional, yes?” Aziraphale looked at Crowley until, realizing that he’d somehow frozen under the directness of this line of conversation, he forced his muscles to move enough to nod.

“Yeah,” he admitted.

The angel held his hand, and though he couldn’t help but feel like there was something pitying in the gesture, Crowley held onto him like a fucking lifeline. “I have enjoyed everything we’ve done, but Crowley. Please. Have I done anything to you that you didn’t want? That you didn’t enjoy?”

Crowley shook his head, hard. “Never.”

Aziraphale smiled, relief clear on his face. “Good. Do you… do you feel that by letting me take the lead, I’ve limited your choices about what we do? Or about how?”

“No.”

“Then why, my darling boy,” the angel said, and kissed his forehead, “would you think that you taking the lead would be such a terrible thing for me? I’m not asking for you to disregard my feelings on anything. Just to… to feel as though you get to pick the direction.”

“Oh.” Crowley was beginning to feel somewhat foolish.

“I thought that, perhaps…” Aziraphale smiled, looking just a touch embarrassed. “That maybe the ropes might be a symbol to you, too. You find it hard to talk sometimes, I’ve noticed. To… to ask. I wanted to try something that would… I don’t know. Remind you that I don’t always have to be the one who decides.”

“That makes sense,” Crowley said, swallowing around nothing. Well, not _nothing._ Really, it was a throat full of anxieties and questions. _Should he have been talking more during sex all this time?_ as an example. He let one of those questions escape, and asked, “Right, so… you’re wanting to lie there and relax, then, right? To let someone else—me, uh, I guess—take over and make it good?”

If that were what this was about, Crowley could understand it a bit better. There was something really appealing about turning off your brain and not having to fucking think about anything for a little while. Crowley himself had certainly done quite a lot of things in his time to try to achieve that same goal.

“Yes!” Aziraphale said, and Satan help him, the angel actually clapped his hands together. “But not just for me. I want you to make yourself feel good, too. To do what you like, what pleases you. I’ll make sure to let you know how it is, or if you ever start to do something that I’m less than eager for… though I truly doubt that would be an issue.”

“I’d want to know.”

“Of course. So… what are your thoughts?”

Crowley once again remembered how Aziraphale had looked in Paris before he’d intervened, those heavy manacles on his arms and that human looming over him, calmly explaining how he was about to murder the angel. He remembered how there had been something that had looked so tragically like resignation in the way Aziraphale had acted, how he seemed unwilling to take even the tiniest action to free himself.

He thought he understood the problem a bit better these days, ever since he’d realized that Heaven actually _had_ put a tight miracle limit on the angel, one that had limited his freedom for years afterward. However, Aziraphale had just proved that he didn’t need _miracles_ to escape from something like that. Sure, there was a difference between silk rope and steel chains, but Crowley would have been very hard-pressed to believe that the angel would have been troubled by the manacles for very long at all had he decided that he’d wanted to get out. Crowley was convinced now more than ever that what had happened in Paris had been some kind of self-punishment, and _fuck._ How fucking small had they made Aziraphale feel to have pushed him to such a place?

Those memories of Paris were now overlaid with newer ones, fresher ones. Aziraphale standing tall and proud in his bookshop, in his _home._ Bound in rope—in Crowley’s color, no less—because he’d _asked to be._ The angel hadn’t looked small then. He looked… confident. Powerful. Fucking _incandescent._

This wasn’t self-punishment, of that much he was certain. This was… indulgence. This was the angel treating himself to something he wanted, something luxurious and sensual and exciting. And really, hadn’t that been what Crowley had always tried to do for him? This was in his power to give. To give, and make it good.

“Alright,” Crowley said, nodding as he shoved his hands in his pockets and made to stand up.

“Alright?” Aziraphale repeated, eyes bright. “So, are you saying you’ll consider it?”

“No, I’m saying I _have_ considered it, and I have decided I am extremely interested.” Crowley got to his feet, stretched, and kissed Aziraphale’s forehead once the angel had straightened up beside him. “Show me where you want to be tied up and let’s go.”

“Right now?”

“If you want. Unless what you’re looking for is going to take more than…” He plucked the angel’s pocket watch out of his waistcoat and peeked at the time. “Fourteen and a quarter hours. Give or take.” Unable to resist, he gave the swell of Aziraphale’s belly a quick pat as he tucked it back away.

“I didn’t want to try to push you into doing this anytime soon, Crowley,” Aziraphale told him. “I just wanted to broach the subject and give you time to think it over.”

“You broached it. Thoroughly, I might add. And I’ve had half an hour to think it over, which if I’m being honest is a lot longer than I spend thinking most things over. You should be proud of me. I devoted full processing power to this one.” Even though it had been a weak joke, Aziraphale still smiled. Crowley brought the angel’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “If you want this, I want this. If you want this _now,_ I can’t think of any reason why we’d need to wait.”

“Well…” Aziraphale said, looking around his feet rather sheepishly. “I already broke all our rope…”

“Give it here, I’ll fix it.” Crowley held out his hand and Aziraphale handed him the pieces from off the floor. Dimly, Crowley registered that he should probably not be using this many miracles right now with another teleportation imminent in his future, but…

Well. It wasn’t like he would _die_ if he overexerted himself, at least not by only this much. Worst case scenario, he’d just go into a torpor for a day or two once he’d gotten back into his rooms in the palace. Could probably prop himself upright in a chair or something, let a few of the humans see that he was alive and definitely not off galivanting around London, and it would be fine. Everything happening right now was promising to lead to a truly _excellent_ time, and he could deal with being a bit tired once he was back in fucking Moscow again for Satan only knows how long.

He touched the frayed ends of the rope together and squeezed, the tiniest trickle of power flowing into the silk to mend the pieces into a single whole. This was barely any energy at all, a drop in the bucket. It was going to be well worth it.

“You said you were going to take me upstairs, earlier,” Crowley said, twisting the rope back into its original bundled form. It seemed a little silly to do, but it gave him something to do with his hands for a moment. Besides, if it were all neatly coiled together, there was less of a chance he would trip on a trailing end while heading up the staircase and put their evening to a premature end by discorporating himself.

“Yes,” Aziraphale sighed, leaning in to kiss him. “Let’s.”

The angel ushered him towards the staircase, letting him go up first and following close behind. As they crossed the threshold into the bedroom, Aziraphale locked the door behind them and guided Crowley out of the way with a hand in the small of his back. The tiny gesture felt marvelously proprietary, and Crowley loved it.

“Right,” Crowley said, looking at the narrow wooden bed. They had had sex in it… how many times by now? And yet, there was something incredibly different about this time, different and wonderfully new. It had everything to do with the kind of trust Aziraphale was going to put in his hands, right here in this familiar space.

“Right,” Aziraphale agreed, nudging his hip into Crowley’s.

“How complicated would you like to get with this?” He asked, holding up the bundle of rope. “Because I think technically, I can unspool this forever.”

The laugh Aziraphale gave was warm and relaxing. “I think simple is maybe better here.”

“Of course. Hate to get you tangled up.”

Aziraphale’s hands went to his collar, loosening his cravat and then starting to work on his waistcoat. He spoke again, casual and calm, though Crowley could easily see the glint of bastardry in those storm grey eyes. “Do you remember,” the angel asked, as if they were doing nothing more than chatting over brunch, “that time we were sailing near Copenhagen?”

Crowley arched an eyebrow, watching with incredulous pleasure as Aziraphale continued to undress himself. “You mean the time I fell overboard?”

“Quite,” the angel said, and tossed his cravat into Crowley’s hands. “Chair, please, my dear.”

He folded the cloth into a small bundle and set it in the seat of the armchair. “What about Copenhagen?”

“Well…” Aziraphale shrugged out of his waistcoat and tossed it Crowley’s way, too. “You got quite tangled in the net. It looked terribly uncomfortable, and I’d hate to experience a repeat performance.”

“I cannot believe you,” Crowley scoffed, unable to do much more than stare. “You’re making fun of me. You’re making fun of me _while you are getting naked._ You’re ridiculous. You know that, right?”

Down now to just his shirt and trousers, Aziraphale stepped closer and gathered Crowley up in a loose embrace. “Someone needs to. Otherwise I’m afraid you would take yourself entirely too seriously, my dear.”

He scoffed again, scoffingly… and took advantage of the increased proximity to tug the front of the angel’s shirt free and start unbuttoning it from the bottom up.

Crowley stated to undress himself next, sparing another quick miracle to ensure his sunglasses would stay in place. When he and Aziraphale were both stripped to the waist, the angel looked at him with obviously pretend shyness.

“Do you want me to undress the rest of the way?” Aziraphale asked him, touching Crowley’s bare chest with the lightest of touches.

“Always want you undressed, angel. What kind of question is that?”

Crowley stopped himself from reaching for the falls of Aziraphale’s trousers. There was a part of him—a large part, actually—that wanted to drop to his knees at the foot of the bed and lovingly unwrap each magnificent inch of the angel. He knew how that would end, though. With the angel’s trousers down around his ankles and Crowley’s mouth getting to work. That wasn’t what Aziraphale was interested in here, though. That was something they’d tried already, tried multiple times, and now Aziraphale was craving novelty. He was wanting to try submitting, just a little bit, just to _relax,_ and that was something Crowley desperately wanted to give him.

Instead of going to his knees, Crowley trailed a finger along the falls and said, “You should take these off and get in the bed.”

Aziraphale blinked at him, then dropped his hands to the front of his trousers and roughly unfastened them. Crowley felt just the tiniest twinge of pride. Apparently, Aziraphale had liked that. Maybe Crowley really could offer this, and offer it while feeling like he was _giving_ something instead of taking something away.

With uncharacteristic haste, Aziraphale took the bundle of clothing Crowley had been accumulating in his hands, along with his own trousers, and tossed all of it into the seat of the armchair alongside his cravat. Crowley got the feeling that the moment he turned his back on the chair, everything in it would probably fold itself. Things like that happened in the shop sometimes, and Crowley didn’t always believe that Aziraphale did those things on purpose. Sure enough, by the time he looked up from undoing his own trousers, the chair was playing host to a neat stack of folded clothes. Just to be contrary, he tossed his trousers over the back.

When Crowley turned around, he was greeted by the sight of Aziraphale lying atop the quilts in his bed. He looked every bit like an image of Dionysus, reclining in luxury while all around him his reveling followers cut loose and debauched themselves. Satan help him, Crowley was definitely in the angel’s thrall.

Aziraphale was watching him, too, and with undisguised appreciation, and Crowley found himself wanting to preen.

“See something you like?” he asked, doing a slow turn in place. He wasn’t quite hard yet, but he was getting there.

“You know I do,” the angel scoffed, playfully batting at Crowley’s thigh. Then he sighed and said in a much softer voice, “I’ve missed this.”

Although Crowley knew he was probably just talking about the sex, _maybe_ about socializing in general… he let the words wash over him like a balm. He was wanted here, at least for today, and he told himself it was fine for him to want, too. At least like this, at least right here. He could let himself relax by a fraction, let himself have fun and enjoy, and mute that gnawing worry that today, after all their days, would be when he finally fucked something up irreparably.

It was an ancient fear he carried with him, the fear that he would reveal some terrible part of himself that was rotting away at the whole. That the angel would realize that there was some part of Crowley that was repellant to him—deficient, somehow, and damaged, too messy and raw and loud and wrong and in any number of ways, _too much_ —and tell him to leave and not came back. Hearing the angel say things like that made it easier to forget about those fears for just a while and savor the moment. So long as the angel kept talking to him, so long as Crowley could hear him, he’d be able to be confident and bold and everything the angel wanted him to be right now.

He cracked a grin and tried to speak, but no sound came out. Crowley looked down at the ropes in his hands, his knuckles white around the cords. Suddenly, he found himself faltering again.

“I don't know what all you were expecting with this, but I don't want—” He exhaled, tapped the bundle of rope against the palm of his other hand. “Can we do this with, uh. You know. Without... gags?”

“Of course,” Aziraphale answered, easy and warm.

He relaxed, then, just by a bit. At the very least, he felt his shoulder drop from where they’d been around near his ears. “Right, sure. Ah, so. What were you expecting, then? Arms and legs, or just arms?”

The angel hummed, fingers drumming on the tops of his plush, gorgeous thighs. “Perhaps just arms, at least this first time? I’d hate for us to have to pause if we wanted to change our positioning.”

“Sure,” Crowley said, sitting down on the edge of the bed next to Aziraphale. “Alright, arms then. Gimme.”

Aziraphale presented his arms, wrists crossed again like they’d been downstairs. Crowley took the angel’s hands in his palm, warm and soft like always, and brought up the bundle of red silk rope. He glanced Aziraphale’s face and found that he looked utterly serene, not a hint of worry in the lines of his face. Crowley pressed a kiss into the back of Aziraphale’s hand and got to work.

As Crowley wrapped the first loop around Aziraphale’s arms, he thought again of Paris… and wondered if Aziraphale was thinking of Paris, too. He had to be, right? At least on some level. The angel didn’t lead the sort of life that led to him getting tied up terribly often—a sort of life like Crowley’s, as an example—so it wasn’t like this kind of thing happened so regularly as to be unremarkable.

 _Maybe he is thinking about Paris,_ Crowley thought. _Maybe this is some kind of a do-over. Writing over a bad memory with a better one._ He could understand that impulse. If Crowley could, there were a number of things he would try to re-do in his own memories. Alcohol could only do so much, and sleep as a method of avoidance backfired sometimes when dreams got involved.

“So,” Crowley asked, making sure the pressure from the rope was even with each new loop. He was creating something here that was snug, but that could be easily pushed out of if the final knot were to be untied. “Do you want to be tied _to_ anything?”

The angel pursed his lips as he considered it. He wiggled his shoulders, testing his range of movement. Crowley’s hands followed his, keeping the knot-in-progress taut. “I believe I would. I like the idea of my arms being secured to something… Behind me, maybe, perhaps just a bit over my head?”

That was… quite the image. Even just imagining it, Crowley’s cock was taking interest. He finished the last loop and tugged the end of the rope back through the rest, lifting Aziraphale’s arms up by the tail.

“Yeah, I think I can manage that. This isn’t too tight, or anything like that?”

“Very comfortable, my dear. And I suppose we could try tying it to…” Aziraphale looked over his shoulder, eyes catching on a bit of decorative carving in his headboard. “The headboard seems the obvious choice, but… Well. I quite like it. Perhaps we should find another place to secure the rope.”

Crowley paused in his tying and raised an eyebrow. “Are you worried about the safety of your bedframe?”

“Well, yes. I'd hate to struggle too vigorously and damage it.”

“Struggle?” He repeated very calmly, not in the vicinity of any tone of voice that might be described as a yelp. "You're going to be struggling?"

“Well... Maybe? I'm not sure. I've never done this before, and I wanted to leave myself the option.” Aziraphale looked adorably huffy, and his cheeks were pinking. “You know how wiggly I get sometimes. This might be a wiggly situation, too. One must always endeavor to be adaptable.”

Right, so Aziraphale was possibly the least adaptable being on the planet under normal circumstances, but Crowley was willing to let his empty platitudes go without comment given that in this _specific_ circumstance, the angel was broadening both their horizons a great deal.

“Yes, you are terribly wiggly. It's a good thing we'll have you well secured,” Crowley said, tugging Aziraphale towards him by the ropes to kiss him. “Otherwise you might well wiggle right over the edge.”

“You were right earlier, you know,” Aziraphale sniffed, his lips pursing in mild irritation. “It _is_ terribly upsetting to be made fun of by someone so distractingly attractive and naked.”

Crowley grinned against the angel’s lips, wolfish and sharp even as the praise lit up all the pleasure centers of his brain. “Distractingly attractive and naked, hm? I daresay you aren’t nearly distracted enough yet, Mr. Fell.” He kissed him again, then—trying very hard not to overthink this—pushed against the angel’s chest with one hand. The other hand held on tight to the end of the rope. “How about you lie back and let me finish what I’ve started?”

Aziraphale’s eyes were wide and excited as he let Crowley guide him down to the mattress. Crowley was leaning over him now, still holding the rope so that the angel’s arms were suspended in the air.

…Actually, that might just work.

“You’re not on another miracle limit right now, are you?” Crowley asked, trailing a finger down the row of loops wrapped over Aziraphale’s wrists and arms.

A flash of alarm appeared in Aziraphale’s expression. “Not… not technically. But it depends on what you’re about to ask me to do.”

“Nothing big,” Crowley promised, tugging Aziraphale’s bindings experimentally, moving his arms over his head and shifting them with careful touches. He was looking for the right height to ensure the angel would have enough slack to bend his elbows if he wanted. “Nothing that would look untoward on a report, either.”

“Well. What do you have in mind?”

“Could you give me something to tie you to? About here should work.” Crowley gestured at a point of empty air a few inches above where the angel’s hands would hang, close to the headboard but not touching it. “If you do it by miracle, we can move it whenever we want.”

“What a clever idea, my dear. I think that might just work.”

Aziraphale shifted his hands around inside his bonds and snapped his fingers. Crowley felt a shimmer of power moving in the air beneath his fingertips and felt around until he encountered something invisible but solid. It felt like some kind of thick ring, bigger than a fist and dense like it was made of metal, though of course it was still only air. He threaded the end of the rope through it and tied a simple but secure knot to keep it in place. Aziraphale moved his arms around and seemed pleased with the range of motion he had.

“And, ah…” Crowley cleared his throat. “If you ever want to. Y’know. Not be tied anymore… You can just drop the miracle. Don’t have to, uh, wait on me for anything.” The beaming smile Crowley got in response left him squirming from the intensity of it.

He shot up off the bed into a standing position, fully intending to get back on the mattress in a more convenient arrangement, but he didn’t. For a moment, Crowley couldn’t do anything at all. He looked over Aziraphale’s gorgeous, prone, _waiting_ body and just… froze. It wasn’t that he couldn’t think of what to do, but that he thought of far too many options to pick just one. He wanted—needed—to make this good for Aziraphale, and by now he had a nearly thirty year-long catalogue of the angel’s favorite things to pull from, but where should he even start?

“You are a tease,” Aziraphale chided, smiling, as he shifted luxuriously on the bed. That little roll of his hip made his half hard cock bounce against the swell of his belly. “Making me wait for it.”

Technically, it was a minor crisis in progress, not a seduction tactic— _Except..._ Well, there was nothing that said it couldn’t be both.

“Enjoying the view,” he said, slowly circling the bed. He watched Aziraphale’s face carefully, looking for some sort of clue of what the angel was hoping for here. Aside from feeling taken care of, of course. Which Crowley fully intended to do once he figured out the rest of it. He knew, though, that Aziraphale did enjoy a bit of denial every now and again. Perhaps he could cover for his own indecision by making it a—a thing.

Something curious happened as he passed by the large chest at the foot of the bed, running his fingertips across the lid as he walked. Aziraphale drew in a breath, his eyes widening. Crowley paused. Then an idea occurred to him.

“This is where you keep your toys, isn’t it?” Crowley asked, rapping quietly on the corner of the chest with a knuckle. He knew the answer, he’d seen Aziraphale take things out of there sometimes over the years. But Crowley hadn’t ever looked inside to see what else it contained, hadn’t ever even been shown the full scope of the angel’s collection. Aziraphale nodded, and Crowley kept his eyes fixed on his face as he slowly began to lift up the lid.

“Oh, you _fiend,”_ Aziraphale gasped, moving to sit up. The ropes pulled taut against that invisible ring, and the angel dropped back down flat against the mattress. A fantastic expression bloomed across the angel’s face at the realization, part excitement and part irritation, and Crowley couldn’t help but grin in answer. “That isn’t fair. Tying me up just so you can rifle through my private belongings.”

“I tied you up because you asked to be tied up,” Crowley reminded him, still not looking inside the chest.

“Yes, well.” Oh, and it was gloriously tetchy. “I’d hoped for something a bit more physically exciting than watching you snoop.”

“I thought I might peruse your collection, angel. See what all you have on offer and pick something I think you’ll enjoy.” He watched Aziraphale swallow, his throat working beneath where his chin had tipped down low in an attempt to see. There was the most beautiful double chin there, and Crowley longed to press his nose up against it. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. Say the word and I’ll shut the lid and walk away, get into bed with you, and do something you _will_ enjoy.”

“Oh. Well.” Aziraphale gave another wiggle—clearly trying to push himself higher up on the pillows so he could see to the end of the bed. It was futile. “In that case… see what you can find, my dear.”

Crowley opened the lid all the way, completely blocking Aziraphale’s view of the inside of the chest and thrilling at the way that seemed to get the angel riled up. Unfortunately, the box was not—as he’d been kind of vaguely hoping—wall-to-wall dildos. He couldn’t see a single one, actually. Just some folded up clothes, some spare candles, and several rolls of parchment. He flipped through the contents quickly but carefully, but still found nothing.

“Angel?” Crowley said, looking over the top of the lid. “You said they were in here.”

“I did,” Aziraphale answered, chin tilted up. He looked so fucking smug, bound as he was and radiant, that Crowley couldn’t help but want to kiss him silly. “But since you’re being a pest, I decided I didn’t need to make it easy on you.”

Crowley laughed, then knelt down and set himself to the puzzle. He felt the sides and bottom of the chest, looking for any measurements that didn’t seem to match up or any imperfections in the wood. A few hundred years ago, Crowley had found himself with something of a fascination for furniture with secret compartments and he prided himself in being accomplished at finding them. It amused him to no end that the angel would have something like this in his home. A secret compartment full of dildos, right here in the bookshop. It felt like a tacit admission that Aziraphale understood that what he was doing wouldn’t be something Heaven would like, but also like evidence of his desire to go ahead and do it anyway.

When at last Crowley found it, that little notch in the corner of the chest, he looked over the top of the lid at Aziraphale again. To his satisfaction, he saw that the angel looked deliciously eager.

“This is cheating, you know,” he said with mock seriousness as he pulled out the drawer. It was far too long to have fit in the part of the chest he found it in, not without divine intervention. “You miracled a little pocket void in there or something. That’s not a proper secret compartment at all.”

“You’re just upset because it took you a moment to find.”

Crowley didn’t speak to that, partially because he didn’t want to dignify it with a response, and partially because he’d just hit _the fucking jackpot._ Right on top in that hidden drawer, he found a book of what appeared to be erotic poetry. Illustrated, even. He lifted it up by the corner to show the angel, who flushed red all the way down to his chest.

“I can explain that,” Aziraphale said, eyes looking a bit frantic.

“There’s no need to explain it, angel,” he purred in response. “I can guess why it’s here.” Crowley had been hoping to get Aziraphale riled up with a bit of flirty teasing, but the look on Aziraphale’s face was too close to shame for comfort.

 _“Please,_ Crowley.” Aziraphale’s voice was so small, and it made something inside Crowley twist up to hear it. “Please don’t mock me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he promised, more earnest than he normally let himself sound. He switched tactics, aiming for one that was well-tested over the centuries: complimenting Aziraphale’s books. He clicked his tongue as he opened the front cover to check its provenance. _“I Modi._ First edition. I’m impressed. I thought these were all destroyed. Is this the only copy left?”

Aziraphale’s frown seemed to fade somewhat, though he still seemed a bit wary. “As far as I know. There might be others, but this is the only one I’ve encountered.” He paused, then spoke up again in a voice that sounded a bit steadier. “Technically, it’s a second edition, but it’s from the first printing to pair Aretino’s verse with Raimondi’s illustrations.”

“It’s gorgeous.” Crowley absently stroked the spine with a long finger. “And I’m glad to know at least one being on this planet had the sense to hang onto a copy. You did well, tucking it away like that.”

“Yes, well. I have an obligation to… to help preserve literary history.” Aziraphale made a face like his excuse sounded weak even to his own ears.

“Naturally,” Crowley said mildly, not giving in to the temptation to tease the angel for it, then flicked to a page at random. Whistling at the detail of the engravings, he added, “I can see why the Vatican wanted these burned. And the sonnets are so… direct. _Open your thighs, so I can look straight at your beautiful—”_

“Crowley, focus,” Aziraphale pleaded. He was still violently blushing, but he was starting to smile, too. “I thought you were looking for the toys.”

He shut the banned book with a quiet thump and set it back down safely inside the chest. “I was, yes.”

“Keep looking, then,” the angel said, voice practically dripping with flirtation. Satan save him, but Aziraphale even parted his thighs a little, too. “You’re getting warmer.”

Underneath where the book had been, Crowley found a shallow box hiding in plain sight. The dark blue velveteen lid was a close color match to the lining of the inside of the drawer, and the dimensions were so close in size that Crowley could barely slip a fingernail in the gap to lift the lid free. Inside, he found exactly what he’d been looking for: a tidy collection of sex toys, some that Crowley had seen before and others that were new to him.

Clever angel. Crowley would have gladly wagered that the book had been left there as a decoy. Anyone trying to hunt through this chest looking for something incriminating (should they even find the drawer at all) would likely see the racy book, and assume that it was what the secret compartment had been designed to hide. They might not think to look any further, and would therefore miss the angel’s far more _personal_ treasure trove hidden beneath it.

Glancing between the contents of the box and Aziraphale—arms bound back behind his head, the thick jut of his cock, the heavy hang of his balls over that tight furl of his anus—Crowley started to formulate a plan. Before he could let himself start to get distracted examining this glorious, _glorious_ collection in detail (or, worse yet, get paralyzed by choice again) he grabbed one toy and shut the lid of the box over the rest. It looked old and well-made, and they’d used it before. If Aziraphale didn’t like it, Crowley could—could set it on the bedside table and use his tongue. He could figure it out.

Crowley took a deep breath to still his ridiculous, _ridiculous_ nerves and put everything back in the drawer as it had been. Closed it back up inside the wall of the chest and shut the lid. He wouldn’t want Aziraphale worrying about his stash being left out in the open.

The oil, he knew, was kept on the top of the bedside table. Clustered all around it were other bottles of a similar size, rendering it inconspicuous. The rest of them either contained perfume or did at one time, the empties allowed to stay in place because Aziraphale never threw anything away. Well, specifically because _“the bottles are so lovely, what with the way the colored glass catches the light.”_ Crowley picked the right bottle on muscle memory, not even hesitating in his choice. Besides, if the wrong bottle got chosen—which had only happened once, and it had been Aziraphale’s mistake instead of his own—the worst that would happen was an arsehole that smelled a bit more like geraniums than usual.

 _“La sélection du jour, monsieur,”_ Crowley said as he crawled back into bed, opening both hands to reveal both the bottle and a delicate-looking plug made from silver.

“Absolutely splendid, my darling. Now…” Aziraphale shifted against the bed where he was bound. “Could we perhaps…”

“Impatient?” Crowley kissed the angel before slipping down to the foot of the bed.

“I thought you were going to leave me here to perish,” Aziraphale said, breathless and happily dramatic. His thighs parted further still.

“Perish the thought,” Crowley answered, lifting one of those beautiful legs so he could slip between them. “And remember. You can drop your miracle and untie yourself whenever you like, for any reason.”

“I remember.” There was something playful in the angel’s voice that hinted at the idea that he might not have minded being kept waiting as much as he was pretending to. “So, tell me. Talented schemer that you are, what plans do you have for me while I am so terribly indisposed?”

The look he gave Crowley as he stretched was such unabashed _invitation_ that it sent a jolt of arousal roaring down Crowley’s spine and into his belly. Thankfully, it made it harder to feel the nerves that had already set up camp there.

 _He wants to relax,_ Crowley reminded himself. _He wants you to do this for him._ Crowley could do that, could give the angel everything he needed… and maybe be a bit louder about what he wanted for himself while he was at it, as what Aziraphale wanted from him right now was for him to step into the lead.

“Well,” he began, and decided it would probably be best if he just blurted it all out up front. “I thought I’d start by opening you up, nice and slow, until you’re ready to take this.” Crowley held up the plug. “Then I’d suck you, ride you, and fuck you until we’re both sticky and satisfied. How’s that sound?”

“Good lord,” Aziraphale said, closing his mouth after it had fallen open. “The _mouth_ on you, Crowley.”

His tone might have been scolding, but Crowley wasn’t fooled. Flushed and squirming, tugging at his ropes presumably just to feel the _bite…_ Aziraphale looked like he was having the time of his fucking life.

Crowley felt his tongue forking in his mouth, and decided to allow it to happen since Aziraphale had been so vocal about liking it during head in the past. At that same moment, he also decided it would be the _only_ slip of demonic physicality he’d allow himself today, during this game of power they were playing while Aziraphale lay prone at his feet. No fangs, no wings, no creeping scales, _definitely_ no bloody tail… just. Human-shaped. Crowley could do that, could keep himself in check like that.

Once he was sure he had the angel’s undivided attention, Crowley pulled the stopper off the bottle of oil and poured a slow drizzle of it over the first two fingers of his hand.

“So I’ve been told,” Crowley said, letting the tips of his tongue peek out from between his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ART! ART! ART! [HERE](https://twitter.com/nothistoryart/status/1329147469180121088?s=20) is Sungmee's gorgeous take on the scene with Aziraphale’s demonstration of strength.  
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>  **Historical Note:** The book Aziraphale has stashed away is _I Modi_ (in English, _The Ways),_ also sometimes called _De omnibus Veneris Schematibus_ _(The Sixteen Pleasures)_ or _Aretino's Postures_. It started as a collection of illustrations by Marcantonio Raimondi in Italy in 1520s that depicted a variety of sex acts and positions using figures from classical mythology. It was intended to be entertaining and instructional, and was disseminated more widely than would have been previously possible due to the relatively recent invention of the printing press. It also really pissed off the Vatican, and the artist was jailed.  
> He was bailed out by a poet named Pietro Aretino, who teamed up with Raimondi after he was free to publish the second edition of _I Modi,_ this time with an accompanying sonnet for each pose. The introduction of the 2nd edition was said to begin, _“Come view this you who like to fuck without being disturbed in that sweet enterprise…with all respect to hypocrites, I dedicate these lustful pieces to you, heedless of the scurvy strictures and asinine laws which forbid the eyes to see the very things that delight them most.”_ Mood. Additionally, some of the figures had the faces of political figures, including some people within the hierarchy of the Catholic church. Big mood.  
> Raimondi escaped being jailed again, but the Vatican rounded up all copies of the first two editions of the book that they could find and destroyed them. There are fragments housed within the British Museum, but no complete copy is still known to exist. However, as subsequent editions of the book have been published that seem to have been based closely off of the originals, it’s theorized that there may be a surviving copy (or more than one) somewhere out in the world in private hands. I like to think that one of those is in a little bookshop in London Soho with incomprehensible business hours.  
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> 
> It might not look like it, but I’ve been a busy bee between updates. I published a new monsterfucker wives one shot, [“gnawing with my teeth my bonds in sunder, I gained my freedom”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27467797), so check that out if emotionally vulnerable comedy smut + sexy body horror is something you’re into. Speaking of ridiculous things with very long titles, I will also be publishing my piece for the Wiggle On Zine on Ao3 Friday (11/20) when our exclusivity period ends. That one’s titled “Security Footage Seemed to Show a Large Swan Being Strangled by a Garden Hose,” and it’s 3k worth of snakey M-rated shenanigans, ft. art by the eternally phenomenal Brydig.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Now, you may have noticed that the last several end notes on these updates have included some… let’s say, _personal anxiety_ spilling over, most of which can be tied to the double dumpster fire I’m living through that is my country’s criminally negligent COVID response & the protracted nightmare that was the U.S. election. Now that one of those things is over, I’d like to say something to follow up on all that anxiety. Partially for closure, partially because we’re living through like 25 concurrent historical events and I like the idea of looking back on my fics in the future and being able to determine which specific crisis was happening when I wrote it.  
> My country just went through the most divisive election since the fucking _Civil War,_ and even though I feel like I can breathe a long-needed sigh of relief, the troubles are far from over. Before diving into that good and necessary work, I’d like to do a bit of outreach to any Trump supporters reading this. I know you’re hurting right now, and I just wanted to say **HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, fuck you.** Your shitty wannabe dictator lost and that’s the funniest shit I’ve seen in this entire hellish year. Now get the fuck off my fic.  
> (“Why would they be reading a queer fic?” you ask. I cannot begin to tell you, but I’ve SEEN some nasty fucking usernames in kudo lists in my time, and I want these people to feel incredibly, wholly unwelcome.)  
> If you have the inclination, here’s some information on how to support the [American Civil Liberties Union](https://www.aclu.org/faqs) and also on how to help [flip Georgia blue](https://flipgeorgia.carrd.co) in the upcoming January Senate runoff elections.
> 
> Next chapter goes up two Thursdays from now on **December the third** , with previews on WIP Wednesdays on my Tumblr. See y’all then!


	16. Courage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You look good like that, angel,” Crowley murmured, running his slippery fingers up Aziraphale’s thigh. To his immense satisfaction, Aziraphale shifted his knees higher and further apart at the touch. “Anyone ever tell you that?”
> 
> A soft, self-conscious laugh huffed out from between Aziraphale’s lips. “Goodness, I should certainly hope not.”
> 
> That, too, sounded immensely satisfying in ways Crowley wasn’t interested in examining right now. “Lucky me,” he said, too lost in the moment to panic about how close that statement came to the kind of things he knew he couldn’t ever say out loud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** Blanket warning for story-typical levels of anxiety, insecurity, and struggles with self-worth.  
> Heads up. In this chapter, Crowley struggles with reconciling his trauma and the potential for exploring further aspects of kink and BDSM with Aziraphale in the future. He is not kind to himself during that thought process, and briefly considers ignoring his personal boundaries to do what he thinks would please his partner. If you need to read a brief summary of the scene for context, there’s one included at the beginning of the endnote.
> 
> Chapter specific boinking notes: Light Dom/sub themes, bondage, anal and vaginal fingering, sex toys, oral sex, anal sex, double penetration (of a sort)  
> Aziraphale begins the chapter with a penis, but shifts his corporation partway through to give himself a vulva. Crowley keeps his same penis the entire time, and although he thinks about growing a second one, he ultimately opts not to. They switch between several different acts/positions but Crowley is (very loosely speaking, since the D/s elements here are pretty mild) the dom here, and always in a very doting way.
> 
> Additional kinks (pain play, choking, and humiliation) are mentioned in relation to character’s boundaries and things they would find uncomfortable. Those kinks and the people who love them are wonderful, and no kink shaming is meant by listing those here. They’re just things these characters aren’t interested in trying, and this fic won’t feature those elements.

Aziraphale was an absolute vision like this, something like pride in the slight arch of his back, in the way he tilted his chin up to look at the demon kneeling between his spread legs. The smile he was wearing was small and just a bit sly, like he was in on a secret that he was considering letting Crowley in on, too. The angel’s plump arms framed his face where they had been pulled up and bound, and Crowley noticed that the undersides of them were paler than the rest of Aziraphale’s skin. It made sense. How many centuries had it been since the angel went outside without at least three layers of clothing between his body and the sun? It reminded Crowley of how, in more ways than one, he was being trusted to see parts of the angel that no one else got to, and the idea of that made him feel more than a bit proud, too.

Crowley transferred the plug he’d been holding into his non-dominant hand and closed it tightly inside his fist so the cool metal could absorb the heat from his skin. He gave his oil-slicked fingertips a similar treatment, rubbing them against his thumb to warm the oil. It was far from cold in the bedroom, what with the merry little fire roaring in the hearth. And besides, Aziraphale always ran hotter than Crowley’s almost cold-blooded corporation did, but… well. Crowley would have to be stupid not to have noticed the preoccupation the angel had with keeping his mostly cold-blooded body warm. What better time could there be to turn the tables on Aziraphale than when the beautiful bastard was tied up and at Crowley’s mercy?

“You look good like that, angel,” Crowley murmured, running his slippery fingers up Aziraphale’s thigh. To his immense satisfaction, Aziraphale shifted his knees higher and further apart at the touch. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

A soft, self-conscious laugh huffed out from between Aziraphale’s lips. “Goodness, I should certainly hope not.”

That, too, sounded immensely satisfying in ways Crowley wasn’t interested in examining right now. “Lucky me,” he said, too lost in the moment to panic about how close that statement came to the kind of things he knew he couldn’t ever say out loud.

Crowley lowered his head to kiss and lick his way around Aziraphale’s gorgeous erection, and the angel bucked his hips to chase the sensation of it. The movement made him strain against where he was tied, loops of scarlet silk rope pressing into his skin like— _very much like_ —the embrace of a serpent. He wasn’t interested in denying Aziraphale anything he wanted today, not a single thing, so Crowley stopped his light teasing and took the angel into his mouth right down to the root.

The angel let out a sharp gasp that pitched higher into something closer to a wail, which he muffled by biting his lip. He was pressing his nose and cheek into the fleshy underside of his arm like he was wanting to cover his face, but he couldn’t, not with his arms bound. Aziraphale did that sometimes, this hiding of his reactions. Less frequently in recent years, but in the beginning of this… _affair_ they were having, he did it rather a lot. But he couldn’t do that now, couldn’t hide the way this made him feel, unless he wanted to move or drop the ropes.

Crowley paused and tapped Aziraphale’s thigh with his fist, bringing the angel’s wide-eyed gaze back towards his own face. He used that nonverbal gesture that the angel had used on Crowley a dozen times since that first time they fucked, that method of checking in that Aziraphale invented to talk to Crowley in those moments when he was struggling to speak. Two quick, significant presses to the angel’s leg—a question, a quiet way of asking, _“No?”_

It seemed to take a moment for the thought to register, but then Aziraphale was smiling and shaking his head. “It’s good, my dear. It’s so good.”

Aziraphale tucked his face back up against his arm, still smiling and very breathless, as Crowley hollowed his cheeks and got back to work. He seemed happy to try to hide, happy to be unable to… happy to be laid bare in his attempt, to be seen even when the pleasure became overwhelming.

That thought seemed to rouse something inside Crowley, something possessive and hungry that wasn’t satisfied with half measures and staying within safe and familiar lines. Something that demanded more than this Arrangement and its rules, more than the roles they had to play. It made him resent how much they had to hide from each other. It made him want to know everything about the angel, want to let the angel know everything about _him,_ even (or maybe especially) the parts that were fragile and aching and unfit. It made him long to—even just once—be totally honest with the angel, spill all his secrets like hot blood on the bedsheets between them and worry about the mess later.

Those kinds of thoughts also made him very grateful—for more than one reason—that he had a cock in his mouth at the moment. If only he could be so lucky all the time, maybe he wouldn’t worry so much about saying things he shouldn’t.

Words were always tricky, but by now, Crowley had cocksucking down to a science. He knew how much pressure Aziraphale liked, knew how to use his tongue to reduce the angel to babbling and heavy breathing. How to gently pet and stroke the tight pucker of his entrance with slick fingers until the angel’s body opened under his touch. The feeling of being drawn inside, hot and soft and wonderful, was fucking _familiar_ to him now, and wasn’t that just a thing? This thing he’d once though impossible was something he was _used to_ now. Even though Crowley knew he didn’t actually have a gag reflex, he told himself his eyes were only stinging because of the way he was swallowing around that thick, gorgeous cockhead.

There was still a lot of this that _was_ new, though. Normally, by the time the taste of precome bloomed bitter-bright on Crowley’s tongue, Aziraphale’s hands would have long since been roving all over his head and the back of his neck. Never holding him down, not really, but playing with his hair. Petting and stroking, sometimes gently pulling. Running his fingernails over his scalp. That wasn’t possible right now, of course. Crowley missed it, but he didn’t miss it enough that it outweighed all of the other fun things about this new idea Aziraphale had wanted to try. True to the angel’s own predictions, he was _incredibly_ wiggly, straining against the ropes and shifting his body with intoxicating rolls of his hips. Crowley also found other ways to get the touch he craved. It wasn’t the same as fingers in his hair, but he definitely wasn’t above rubbing the side of his face against those soft, gorgeous thighs while he worked his angel open on his fingers.

Aziraphale groaned at him when he withdrew, and Crowley moved quickly to make sure he didn’t leave him waiting and empty for long. The plug was warm by now from his palm, and he ran a soothing thumb around Aziraphale’s twitching rim while he smeared the toy with oil with his other hand. He pressed it to the angel’s entrance gently, for now only wanting to let him know it was there, and pulled off his cock with a wet pop and a kiss to the tip.

“Ready?” He asked, rubbing a slow circle into Aziraphale’s hip just beside the swell of his belly. Aziraphale grinned up at him, huffing out a breath that started out as a laugh and became a moan as Crowley slid the plug inside him.

Crowley slithered out from in between Aziraphale’s legs and draped himself across the angel’s soft, warm body. He wasn’t quite sure what exactly it said about him, but over the decades, Crowley had come to realize that this, this full-body contact, was one of his favorite things about sex. Scratch that. It was one of his favorite _things,_ period. It was just something that only happened during sex, or in the immediate aftermath if Aziraphale were feeling particularly cuddly. He missed it a lot when they were apart, and sometimes when they were together and still clothed… but how the Heaven could he ask for it by name? _Look, angel. I know we’re just friends—friends who shag a lot, sure, but friends—but what I really want right now, more than anything, is for us to get naked and for you to hold me._ Yeah, right. Better to get as much of it as he could when it was situationally appropriate.

Since Aziraphale couldn’t exactly do much holding right now, Crowley did enough for both of them. He reached his hands in between Aziraphale’s raised arms, cupped the angel’s face, and ran his fingers through the sweat-damp curls at his temples. Tilted his chin up so he could kiss him, slow and filthy, just like he knew Aziraphale liked it. Rolled his hips to give his own aching erection a bit of relief by pressing it into Aziraphale’s incredible belly. It gave Aziraphale a bit of sensation, too, enough to have him writhing beneath Crowley again, but not enough to finish him off. Crowley still had other things in mind for that.

“Do you remember step two?” Crowley murmured against Aziraphale’s lips, the angel’s hot breath slipping into his waiting mouth with each heavy, panting exhale.

“Step—step two?” Aziraphale asked, his eyes fluttering shut as he pushed his burning, spit-slick cock against Crowley’s hip.

Crowley nodded, smiling indulgently. If this were truly what Aziraphale wanted from him, what he’d meant when he asked Crowley to _take the lead…_ Well, Crowley was finding he didn’t mind it one bit. The fear was still there somewhere in the back of his mind, telling him he could fuck everything up with one wrong move, but the sheer _want_ on Aziraphale’s face was making it harder to hear. Aziraphale _liked_ a little suspense, _liked_ knowing that it would be Crowley making the next move. If this was all this meant, then this was something Crowley could provide and could _like_ providing.

“I told you what I wanted to do with you,” he murmured, leaning into that reserve of confidence he’d just found. “I said I was going to open you up for your fancy little toy, and then I was going to suck that pretty cock of yours.”

Aziraphale huffed out a laugh and kissed him. “Ah yes. You said you’d suck me, ride me, and then fuck me. Clever, making a plan that rhymes. Very memorable.”

“So, you do remember step two, then. Good. I’ve been looking forward to this bit.” Crowley placed an open-mouthed kiss to the hinge of the angel’s jaw, working his way down Aziraphale’s throat in a searing line as he shifted his hips lower and lower.

“Wait, _wait,”_ Aziraphale gasped, breathing hard. Crowley froze. “Be careful, please don’t rush yourself. My hands are tied, I haven’t—haven’t been able to…”

Truthfully, Crowley was already pretty relaxed, and he could probably get himself ready in just a few minutes with his hand. Maybe even with Aziraphale’s cockhead if he was feeling bold. True, it _had_ been years since he’d taken Aziraphale up the arse, but his corporation wasn’t human, and it stored those memories just below his skin, fresh and vivid like no time had passed at all. Still, he found he wasn’t in the mood to wait, and he didn’t want Aziraphale to worry about something as small as making sure Crowley got enough prep.

“A little infernal miracle won’t hurt,” he said, as much to Aziraphale as to himself, and snapped his fingers. Crowley shivered slightly as the magic caressed him in some terribly intimate places, opening him up in one inexorable slide and leaving him slick, empty, and _ready._

He couldn’t help but close his eyes as he sat back and felt Aziraphale’s cockhead nudge against his loose, tingling rim. It met resistance for only a fleeting moment before it pushed inside, the most welcome intrusion filling him up and holding him open. Crowley didn’t stop moving until he had taken all there was to take, and then let himself savor the feeling for just the span of a few heartbeats—his own, and Aziraphale’s, both their hearts clamoring together as they lay there chest to chest.

“Oh, _fuck,_ Crowley,” Aziraphale groaned, straining against the ropes as he struggled not to buck his hips upwards. “You’re so—so hot and tight. You feel incredible.”

Crowley pushed back, spearing himself precious millimeters deeper on Aziraphale’s hard length. He dragged himself forwards until the angel’s cockhead tugged at his rim, then took him all again in one harsh thrust. Aziraphale whined and tucked his face up against his arm, breathing in hitching gasps as Crowley built up a rhythm that was slow and brutal and maddening.

Arching his back as only one with the spine of a serpent could, Crowley lowered his face to Aziraphale’s bare chest and opened his mouth. For just a moment, the skin there was soft, the softest thing he’d ever felt on his tongue—a moment later, he felt the skin draw up firm against his lips, the chill of the air and the thrill of touch taking their effect. He couldn’t help himself. He pressed his face even closer against his chest and gently, so gently, rolled the nipple between his teeth. Of course, he’d checked for fangs first. There was a hard limit to how wild he’d let himself go with all of this, and fangs would still be a definite _no_ even if Aziraphale weren’t tied up.

Crowley rolled his head to the side, nuzzling his nose and cheeks across the patch of white-blond hair that covered Aziraphale’s sternum and the tops of his pectorals. There was sweat here, too, and he didn’t even care that it was getting all over his face. It smelled so strongly of _angel_ that his head was swimming by the time Crowley turned his attentions to Aziraphale’s other nipple. This one he played with a bit longer, toying with it with both sides of his forked tongue before sucking it into his mouth and giving it a gentle nibble.

Aziraphale was a gorgeous wreck beneath him, hair damp and face flushed, eyelids fluttering as he took each slide and push that Crowley gave him. He was canting his hips up to meet him as much as he could, but it was difficult to get leverage at this angle. Crowley relented, peppering the angel’s chest and lips with goodbye kisses before pushing himself upright. Fuck, but Aziraphale’s cock felt even better like this, with gravity and the weight of his own corporation working in tandem to fill him up as much as it was possible to be filled. Aziraphale’s hips gave another weak jerk, and Crowley placed his hands on them and held them down against the mattress.

“Let me,” he said, lifting his body and letting it drop.

_“Fuck,”_ Aziraphale gasped, those storm-blue eyes flying open.

Good. Crowley wanted him to watch this, wanted him to see Crowley’s corporation writhing and twitching and jerking above him. Wanted him to see Crowley _take him_ again and again, wanted him to see how hard and straining Crowley’s own untouched erection was, and all of it for him. Wanted him to watch as Crowley fucked himself hard and fast on his cock, as fast and as hard as Crowley wanted to be fucked, without any of that gentleness the angel normally made himself give when he was the one doing the fucking. Crowley loved the tender sex, loved _all_ the sex, but he wasn’t fucking _fragile._ He was a demon, and he could be fucked hard and deep by his angel and _like it,_ and he wanted Aziraphale to see that too. Wanted him to see that Crowley could _do this,_ could be everything Aziraphale wanted of him, could be fucking _useful._

The noise Aziraphale made as he came was hoarse and ragged, a long low moan cutting through the other sounds in the room, the creaking of the bedframe and the quick, harsh slap of skin on skin. Crowley fucked him through it, hissing in pleasure as he felt each hot pulse of Aziraphale’s release. He was hard, still, and he knew that if he wanted to, he could come just from this. That, or he could stroke himself off and spill all over Aziraphale’s belly and chest— _Satan, what an image_ —but instead he slowed and stopped. This was about Aziraphale, and he wanted to see how Aziraphale was doing first.

“Goodness,” was the first word Aziraphale managed to say as he began to come down from his peak. He was out of breath but grinning.

“Goodness has nothing to do with it,” Crowley countered, grinning, too. He felt his chest heaving from exertion, and like Aziraphale, he’d apparently broken a sweat. The hair on the back of his neck was damp and he felt a drop break free to cut a chill path down the length of his spine.

“You always told me you hated riding, but my darling.” Aziraphale fucked upwards, nudging Crowley’s prostate and making him tense and groan. “You’re a natural in the saddle.”

“I take it back,” Crowley gasped. “We should have gagged you.”

Aziraphale’s mouth made a perfect, pink little ‘o.’ “I thought you said…”

“Undignified, this is.” He prodded the angel’s thigh. “Jokes at my expense when you’re balls deep in me, you monster.”

“I hadn’t _really_ considered a gag,” the angel said, matter of fact but curious, “but I’d be willing to try if you wanted.”

Crowley did his best not to flinch. “You do want to keep going, then?” He asked, shifting his hips.

“Well,” Aziraphale said, pushing his legs—and, by extension, Crowley’s legs—just that much further apart. “You did promise me a step three.”

“I think that can be arranged.” Crowley hesitated, doing some risk-assessment calculations in his head before he spoke again. “Instead of a gag, how about I keep you busy enough to stop you from trying to be funny, hmm?”

Aziraphale laughed, spreading his thighs further. It pushed Crowley off-balance, making him fall forward onto his hands above him. If the angel’s intent had been to get Crowley to snog him within an inch of his life, well. He succeeded.

“On your back, or on your front?” Crowley asked, once they had broken apart again.

A brightness lit up the angel’s expression. “Could we switch? I think I’d like to be on my knees.”

“Sure thing, ‘Ziraphale,” Crowley mumbled through a dazed smile. He dismounted—because, of course, Aziraphale’s ridiculousness had gotten that terminology into his head—and shivered at the feeling of Aziraphale’s softening cock sliding free as he lifted himself off of the angel’s body. Spend dribbled down the insides of his thighs, and Crowley resolved to deal with that later. Once he was standing, he grabbed onto the invisible ring that held the ropes and wrenched it into a position lower in the air, towards the mattress. Aziraphale’s arms followed it down, and Crowley rubbed the angel’s elbows. They were probably a bit stiff by now, after all.

Aziraphale rolled over onto his stomach, baring a sweaty back marked all over with pink lines from the sheets. Crowley kissed each one he found, and then both cheeks of the angel’s plump bottom once Aziraphale had gotten his knees under him and lifted his backside up into the air. The base of the plug peeked out between his cheeks, shiny and silver and tantalizing. He couldn’t help but give it a little nudge as he crawled back up onto the bed behind the angel.

“Think you’re ready?” Crowley asked, tugging the plug back by just a fraction. Aziraphale groaned and his head dropped down on top of his bound arms.

“Why don’t you find out?” He said, muffled.

The back of Aziraphale’s neck was scarlet, and Crowley saw his shoulders tremble as he slowly, _slowly_ pulled the toy out to its widest point and then all the way out. Aziraphale’s hole fluttered around nothing and Crowley tossed the plug aside, reaching for the bottle of oil and pouring it on both of his hands. He rubbed a generous portion of it around the angel’s rim before dipping his thumbs inside, giving the angel’s arsehole a gentle stretch as he worked the oil in. Aziraphale whined at the sensation.

“Gorgeousss,” Crowley hissed, not even noticing his own slip.

The angel turned his face to the side so he could be heard. “Crowley, can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

His voice was tentative but eager. “Can you give me the same… _fervor_ that you had before? When you were riding me?”

Crowley’s hands stilled in their ministrations. All at once, this was Paris again. Here was Aziraphale, kneeling on the bed with his legs spread and his arms held out in front, begging Crowley to fuck him harder.

Except… this was different. This was London Soho, not Paris. This was Aziraphale’s bedroom over the shop, a place they’d been visiting for twenty years, not Crowley’s shabby inn room in Montmartre above a tavern just a half-step above a bordello. Aziraphale wasn’t begging, he was asking… and Crowley wanted to give him what he wanted.

He took a deep, steadying breath, then shifted his hands to pull Aziraphale’s cheeks apart. “Sure, angel. Let me know if it’s too much.” Crowley slicked his cock and pushed inside, slowly at first, but he didn’t pause until he’d bottomed out. He waited for Aziraphale’s jerky nod to move again. “Might not last long, but I can keep going if you aren’t done when I am.”

Aziraphale shuddered and nodded again, hard. “Please move. Please, I’m ready.”

Crowley pulled back and snapped his hips forward, holding himself away from the edge of _too much_ by his bloody fingernails alone. Well, if Aziraphale wanted this fast and hard, he could do that… but he wasn’t going to damage him. Wasn’t going to use him like a thing for his own pleasure. He would make this as good as he could. Crowley rolled his hips in a wave, steady and driving but not—not cruel. Not mindless. No matter how good it felt, that sweet hot clench of the angel’s body around his cock, the glistening pink stretch of his rim, the soft pressure of Aziraphale’s arse against his hips, those _moans…_ it didn’t matter. Crowley wouldn’t do a thing to hurt him.

When he reached around to wrap a hand around the angel’s cock, Crowley was surprised to find the slick folds of a cunt there instead. He hadn’t even noticed when Aziraphale had changed himself. The first thought that came to mind was a bloody stupid one, something about how if he went a bit more snake, he could have two cocks and could fuck the angel twice as well that way. Not that Aziraphale would want those things anywhere near him, of course. Those cocks weren’t very human-like. Stupid thought. Besides, there was absolutely no way he’d be _going snake_ any more at all, so he pushed the thought away.

“Angel?” He asked, his fingers finding Aziraphale’s clit.

“In me,” Aziraphale panted, speaking directly into the mattress. “Fingers. Please, in me.” _Fuck,_ he was to the incoherent babbling stage and it was doing things to Crowley’s head.

Crowley didn’t need to be told twice. He kept his hand on the angel’s clit, middle finger working quick circles around it, and brought his other one around to feel for his entrance. Fuck, he was already so fucking wet… Without further preamble, he slid two fingers inside Aziraphale’s cunt and spread them apart in a vee. Aziraphale moaned and begged and swore, and Crowley discovered just how much this did it for him, how good it was to be able to feel his own cockhead fucking the angel’s arse through the walls of his cunt. He pumped his hips faster, the rhythm stuttering as he finally reached his own climax, and all the while Aziraphale just took and took and took. When Crowley came, he did so with the angel’s name on his lips. Satan only knew how long he’d been repeating it like the prayer it was.

Heart hammering in his chest, Crowley let himself bask in the afterglow of his orgasm for only a few moments before pulling out and helping Aziraphale roll back over onto his back. His arms were in an awkward position like this, Crowley could tell, but the angel was close, and he kept begging Crowley not to stop. Fingers still working quick and deep inside his lover’s cunt, Crowley reached for the bindings’ invisible anchor and tugged it back up higher into the air so Aziraphale could shift his shoulders and get comfortable again.

The angel came with a high, gasping whine and an almost violent spasm of his body, pulling taut against the ropes like he was wanting to thrash his way free. Crowley fingered him through it until the arrhythmic clenching of his cunt slowed and stopped entirely, and his twitching came from overstimulation rather than pleasure.

Perhaps a second after that, the invisible anchor disappeared and Aziraphale’s arms dropped with a heavy, sweaty slap onto his chest. They were still tied together, so Crowley shimmied up the angel’s body as fast as he could and pulled the ropes loose. Like before, there were pink lines crisscrossing Aziraphale’s forearms. These were brighter and deeper than the ones he saw downstairs earlier, but as far as Crowley could see, there were still no bruises or scrapes. Crowley collapsed, boneless, across the angel’s body and lazily kissed his way up and down both arms. It wasn’t long before he felt Aziraphale laughing beneath him.

“Dear me,” Aziraphale said. He was bright eyed and giggly, and _fuck,_ Crowley loved him more than his poor shriveled up heart could contain. Crowley couldn’t keep looking at him like this or he was just going to do it, was just going to blurt everything out and ruin the best thing in his miserable life.

Out of self-preservation, Crowley did the only thing he could think of. He shoved the side of Aziraphale’s forearm in his mouth and blew a loud, long raspberry. Aziraphale shrieked and seized Crowley’s floppy body in a tight grip with all four of his Earthly limbs, rolling them both over until Crowley was on the bottom… and very nearly on the floor.

“Wiggly bastard,” Crowley slurred, and kissed him.

Somehow, they managed to haul themselves back into Aziraphale’s narrow little bed and into a relatively normal position. Crowley had his back up against the headboard—more specifically, up against Aziraphale’s endless collection of pillows—and his skinny legs spread to make room for Aziraphale, who seemed content to lay face down in Crowley’s lap with the quilt pulled over them. He wasn’t sure how it could be comfortable, what with the way the angel’s face was smushed against his bony hip, but Aziraphale seemed reluctant to move. Crowley was not above taking advantage of the position, though, not by any means. It meant that Aziraphale’s neck and shoulders were within easy rubbing distance, and he kept his hands busy while Aziraphale dozed. Or daydreamed, maybe. He still wasn’t sure if the angel ever actually slept, but he seemed to be enjoying laying there doing nothing.

That had been… fun, actually. Relatively uncomplicated fun, too, which was such a rarity for the two of them. It had been nerve-wracking and slightly terrifying at the beginning, and while he hadn’t ever really got _past_ that, Crowley relaxed this time in a way he normally never let himself do during sex. The ropes gave him visual confirmation that Aziraphale was happy with the choices he was making, and even more than that, that he _wanted_ Crowley making those kinds of choices.

He realized, though, that this whole experience hadn’t exactly been without cost. Part of it probably had to do with the fact that he’d teleported halfway across the globe earlier today, but Crowley felt wrung out. Definitely in a good way, at least for the most part. If he were to be honest with himself, he’d admit that the biggest reason why he felt like a wet stocking had been all the fucking _talking._ There were definitely easier ways to have sex, and while he figured that he’d eventually get used to it if they kept doing things like this, he also knew that those conversations like the one they had today would still have to keep happening. He knew he’d always need to check in with Aziraphale and see how he was doing first.

Today had been good, but what would happen if they tried this again later, maybe after those bastards Upstairs had gotten the chance to twist things up inside Aziraphale’s head again? _Especially_ since Aziraphale had asked him to be a bit, well… a bit less gentle with him just now. Crowley had been rough with himself, too, but he’d known his own limits, had known where to hold back before his pleasure courted the risk of injury.

A worrisome thought occurred to Crowley in that moment. This, Aziraphale had told him, had been an attempt for the angel to chase novelty. Crowley wasn’t exactly concerned about his ability to _keep up,_ not really. He was easily Hell’s most creative demon and though that wasn’t exactly a high bar, Crowley _was_ confident his imagination could help him here. What worried him more was _Aziraphale’s_ imagination. This was a human thing he’d wanted to try, something he said he’d read about, and the humans had been doing weird and wonderful and terrible things to each other since the Garden. With the full scope of human experience at his fingertips, where would Aziraphale’s hunger for new experiences lead him next?

There were so many humans that craved cruelty, or at least something that passed for it if you looked only from a distance. Harmless stuff if everyone was happy with it, and most of the time they all were. Crowley just… struggled to fit the angel into that mental picture. Would Aziraphale... be interested in that sort of a thing? All that... striking business. The choking. The humiliation. It didn't seem likely, but after all this time Aziraphale still regularly surprised him. Hell, today had already been full of surprises, and it was just now barely sunset.

If Aziraphale enjoyed today, their little flirtation with control, would he want more? Would he expect Crowley to hurt him? Crowley didn't like the idea of that, not a bit. He'd done it before, when Dagon scheduled him shifts in Torments that he couldn't wriggle out of, but he'd never enjoyed it. But if that were what Aziraphale liked, he thought he could manage. Could... make it nice for him. He was used to having to hurt people when he didn't particularly want to.

But maybe he had it the other way around and it wasn't that way at all. Maybe Aziraphale would want to hit _Crowley._ That he was a bit more comfortable with, though it still made him feel a bit flighty. He didn't _like_ pain, not at all, but he was accustomed to dealing with it. A little bit of slap and tickle from Aziraphale would be nothing compared to what Hastur could dish out when he was in one of his moods. Crowley was a demon. He could take it. It would be fine.

Really, if this sort of thing were something Aziraphale was interested in... it might actually be a good thing that he would be trying it with a demon. No matter what role he might want Crowley to play, he’d been trained for it for millennia in the bowels of Hell. Ideal partner, him. Wouldn’t even make a fuss over it.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale asked, startling him. Crowley was ashamed to find that he even flinched.

“Mmm?” He tried to make sure his face was neutral, because Aziraphale had definitely rolled over onto his back to look up at him from his position in Crowley’s lap.

“Is everything alright? You went very quiet and still for a moment.”

“M’fine,” Crowley said, offering a smile. “I think I just got lost in thought there for a bit. I’m alright, though.”

“What were you thinking about?” Aziraphale asked, because of course he did. There was a little hesitation in his voice, too, because _of course there was,_ because Crowley had gone all weird on him right after the angel had just taken what he had probably thought was something of a risk in asking for the ropes.

Crowley breathed out through his nose, long and slow. They’d have to talk about things eventually. Better to do it now, when he was already more than halfway through his allotted number of hours here in London. If he waited until the next time he was here, he’d probably either be too cowardly to ask about this at all, or end up disappointing the angel and be asked to leave in the middle of a visit that could possibly last _months_ otherwise.

He looked down at Aziraphale and studied his face. The wrinkles at the corners of those eyes, the lines from all the times he smiled. Aziraphale had a kind of power over him, yes, and he was afraid to _lose_ him… but Crowley was realizing he shouldn’t be afraid _of_ him. He hadn’t fucked up bad enough to lose him for good yet. Maybe he could be brave again here, just once more?

“Are you interested in… Uh.” Crowley cleared his throat, searching to find the fastest way through this conversation and out the other side again. “Well. Rougher things?”

“Rougher things?” Aziraphale repeated.

Fuck. He was going to make him spell it out, wasn’t he?

“You, ah. You said you got the idea for this from something you read, and the—some of the things the humans get up to.” He shrugged, stiff and quick. “Humans get up to a lot of things. I wondered… where your interests lie.”

“Was there something specific you had in mind?”

Crowley paused for perhaps a heartbeat. It felt a lot longer, though, long enough that he thought Aziraphale might sense his hesitation, might see right through him and find him hollow.

When he spoke, it was cool and disaffected. “How do you feel about pain?”

The pause Aziraphale gave him in return was longer still, and he watched as Aziraphale brought his hands up to rest on the top of the quilt. He wasn’t tugging on his own fingers, wasn’t twisting his ring in agitation… but Crowley could tell he probably wanted to be. His thumbs traced the worn seam between two patches while he frowned, searching for words.

“That is… a very particular question,” he said at last.

Well, it didn’t seem like he was going to be getting anger or disgust, just confusion. Surprise, even, like this was the last question Aziraphale expected to hear. Crowley tilted his head to one side and then the other, considering how to proceed. He wanted, quite a lot, to look like someone who didn’t care that much about either the question or its answer, but he doubted it worked. “I’m just… curious, I suppose. Want to hear your thoughts.”

Aziraphale pushed himself up into a seated position, hands still worrying the quilt. He stared down at the fabric, not letting himself make eye contact. “I… I don’t think I could be intentionally cruel to you. I don’t want to bring you pain. I don’t want to hurt you.” Aziraphale’s eyes flicked upwards and then away. Crowley watched as he rolled the edge of the quilt between his fingers. “Oh, I suppose I could find a way to provide that, if that were what you wanted of me. Or… or needed. But I very much doubt I would find much enjoyment in it.”

Crowley experienced a rather peculiar set of reactions just then. Part of it, he was ashamed to say, was relief. He refused to think of himself as having been _nervous_ about the possibility. No. He’d been perfectly fine. But they _had_ just dodged a rather fraught conversation… and being overly relieved about that felt somewhat cowardly, too. Another part of the reaction had been distress, particularly as he watched Aziraphale fidget with the blanket. The angel was feeling anxious, maybe even guilty, and Crowley was the source.

More than anything, though, Crowley felt an overwhelming desire to touch. He gave in to that urge, moving slowly to give Aziraphale time to react. Raised his arm in invitation for the angel to lean against him, brushed the angel’s leg with his own. It worked. Aziraphale tilted to the side, propped himself up against Crowley’s chest, and started to drop his defenses. Crowley wrapped his arms and legs tighter around him, held him close. Folded his hands over Aziraphale’s where they rested in the angel’s lap in hopes that if the angel needed to keep picking at something, he could spare this old quilt he liked so much.

“I wasn’t asking as an overture,” Crowley said, his voice low and soft. “Or as a request.”

“You weren’t?”

“Nah. Not really my scene.” When he saw Aziraphale’s tentative smile, Crowley pressed onwards, feeling emboldened. “The hair pulling? That’s different, that’s… I like it. Sometimes. And if you wanted to give my arse a smack, I’d not be bothered by that. But I’m… generally speaking, I’m pretty content with what we already do. No need to complicate it.”

The angel’s eyes were wide and round, and before Crowley’s anxiety could completely consume him, Aziraphale nodded and told him, “Duly noted, thank you.” He cleared his throat. “I also enjoy what we do.”

“…Mfneh. Right. Well, that’s… Yeah.” Crowley concluded that totally inane statement by nodding much faster than necessary. “So, we agree.”

“It seems we do.” Aziraphale’s smile was brilliant. “Now, tell me. How did you like what we tried today?”

Crowley exhaled through his lips. “Very… very enjoyable. Happy to do that again, literally whenever you’d like.”

Trapped as he was between the headboard and Aziraphale’s body, he felt the reverberations of the angel’s laughter through his whole chest. “I liked it. It might not be something I want every time, but it was… it was fun. I enjoyed your plan very much, and true to your promise I did find myself sticky and satisfied by the end.”

Crowley laughed and let his shoulders finally drop. His body sagged against the pillows, Aziraphale’s following along behind. “Want a hand with that?” He asked, mouth pressed against Aziraphale’s temple. The sweat there was rapidly cooling, which reminded Crowley that the come between his own legs had long since gone tacky. “The sticky part, specifically.”

“Oh, would you?” Aziraphale asked, rolling his shoulders. He waved his hand in the direction of the bedside table and his cluttered collection of perfume bottles scooted to the side to make room for the basin of water that had just appeared there.

The sight of it made Crowley’s throat feel a little tight. They could have done it all with a miracle, and yet this is what Aziraphale wanted. The slow way. The human way. He wanted to be touched. He wanted Crowley to keep touching him.

Pushing the quilts down below waist level, Crowley reached for the sponge floating in the steaming water. Wrang it out until it was no longer dripping, nudged Aziraphale’s hands to the side so he could clean his belly. Aziraphale’s head lolled on his shoulder, his eyes fluttering shut. A small smile was on his lips.

A floral scent began to coat Crowley’s tongue, growing stronger the next time he dipped the sponge in the basin. “Did you seriously summon lightly heated rose water for your post-coital sponge bath?” He asked, and Aziraphale hummed his assent. Crowley snorted. “You’re ridiculous.”

Aziraphale opened one eye. “And you’re next, so you’d better start thinking about what you’d like to smell like.”

Crowley laughed, but answered almost immediately. “Rose water.” He liked the idea that, even after he went away tonight, he’d carry this matching perfume on his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Context Spoilers:**  
>  The things Crowley experiences in Hell are left intentionally vague, but he has definitely been physically abused, and also has been forced to hurt others. While emotions are high right after sex, Crowley gets it in his head to question whether, in addition to bondage and light D/s, Aziraphale might also like things like pain play and humiliation (things that don’t exactly play well with Crowley’s specific traumas). Those anxious thoughts start to spiral.  
> Initially, Crowley decides to shelve his own boundaries and do whatever Aziraphale might theoretically ask of him, no matter how uncomfortable it would be for himself. He rationalizes this by telling himself that, since a demon should be used to both inflicting and experiencing unwanted pain, he should be able to “get over it” and show Aziraphale a good time.  
> However, instead of putting himself through something he doesn’t actually want, Crowley chooses to have a conversation with Aziraphale about what they both want out of future sexual encounters. Aziraphale explains that he is not interested in pain play or humiliation at all, so it won’t actually be an issue for them going forward. The conversation is kind of tense and awkward, but it works out well in the end.
> 
> The intersection between kink and trauma is sometimes messy. While Aziraphale and Crowley ultimately decide that certain kinks aren’t for them, this is not a judgement on my part as an author towards those kinks. It’s also definitely not my intention to say that kink isn’t “for” people who have traumas. Every single day, people out in the world navigate mental health, trauma, and kink in ways that are healthy and fulfilling for them. If I have any stance here at all, it’s that communication is key and that boundaries need to be respected, even (especially) one’s own.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Hooboy, this section really got away from me, so even though I thought 1820 would only take three chapters, we still have one more left. I have already upped the chapter count to reflect this, and reserve the right to up it again, but we _are_ nearing the end of Gentle Night, Little Stars. :)
> 
> That last 1820 chapter is scheduled to go up next Thursday, **December 17th** , but that date is a bit tricky. It’s a year and a day after I lost someone very close to me, so I’m going to keep the scheduling a little flexible on that one. The expanded chapter count at least means I won’t be posting a super angsty one that day, though!  
> As always, I post chapter previews on my tumblr on WIP Wednesdays—sometimes of Gentle Night, sometimes of other projects I’m working on.  
> Stay groovy, y’all!


	17. On Purpose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It smells like brimstone. We can’t reuse it if that would mean leaving it in the shop. Do you want it?”
> 
> Crowley froze. He didn’t get many keepsakes. It was difficult to keep _anything_ when one worked for Hell and could be forced to move across the globe at any moment. Possessions got in the way. But this was something special, something tangible he could hold in his hand left over from this incredible day.
> 
> Which meant he couldn’t keep it, either.
> 
> “Probably smells like angel sweat,” Crowley said, shaking his head.
> 
> Aziraphale hesitated for just a second, then the silk rope dissolved into a shimmer of red smoke and faded away.
> 
> “I don’t think all the rose water in the world could hide it,” the angel murmured, an unreadable look on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Notes:** Description of someone having a panic attack during sex, which results in their partner stopping/changing what they’re doing to better take care of them. Neither the sex nor the panic attack is described in explicit detail. The person who panics is pretty unkind to himself about it later, though.
> 
> Chapter specific sex acts: There are no explicit sex scenes in this chapter, only discussions of encounters that happen “off-page,” some of which involve light bondage and mild power exchange.

Later, after they were clean and sweet-smelling, after Aziraphale mentioned food and Crowley mentioned alcohol, the decision was made that they should pry themselves out of bed and venture out again into the world. First, though, they needed to get the flat back into order. Aziraphale made up the bed and Crowley hid the rest of the evidence—tucked the bottle of oil back into place, slipped the plug back in its secret drawer, put everything in its proper place so Aziraphale wouldn’t worry about it while they were away.

They also took the time to hide the evidence on their corporations, each taking a turn getting dressed in front of Aziraphale’s big, age-spotted mirror to make sure no sign of the afternoon’s dalliances would be visible outside of the shop. Crowley let Aziraphale go first, for reasons totally unrelated to his desire to sit on the top of the chest at the foot of the bed and stare at the angel’s bum a bit longer.

During Crowley’s turn at the mirror, he noticed that Aziraphale had gone quiet and looked up just in time to see the angel do something strange. Aziraphale was standing there beside the bed, staring at the coiled shape of their rope in his palm, clearly considering what to do with it. Then, he lifted it up to his nose and _sniffed._ Stranger still, whatever it was he’d smelled there made him look terribly disappointed for a moment. Crowley hadn’t meant to let Aziraphale see him observing him, but their eyes met over Crowley’s shoulder in the mirror.

He didn’t ask for an explanation, but Aziraphale gave him a sheepish look and offered him one, anyway. “It smells like brimstone. We can’t reuse it if that would mean leaving it in the shop. Do you want it?”

Crowley froze. He didn’t get many keepsakes. It was difficult to keep _anything_ when one worked for Hell and could be forced to move across the globe at any moment. Possessions got in the way. But this was something special, something tangible he could hold in his hand left over from this incredible day.

Which meant he couldn’t keep it, either.

“Probably smells like angel sweat,” Crowley said, shaking his head.

Aziraphale hesitated for just a second, then the silk rope dissolved into a shimmer of red smoke and faded away. Though Crowley knew the miracle had destroyed any trace of the thing, Aziraphale brushed his hands off on his trousers out of something like habit as he crossed the room towards where Crowley stood.

“I don’t think all the rose water in the world could hide it,” the angel murmured, an unreadable look on his face. Then, he smiled and finished tying Crowley’s cravat with deft, practiced fingers.

As it was after dark by then, and as such also after the end of Aziraphale’s normal business hours—though of course he had been closed all day for an important meeting with a rare book dealer, as he would tell any customers who might ask him tomorrow—they left the shop separately. Aziraphale out the front door, Crowley through the back alley, just like always. They would return the same way, too, after they finished their supper at a pub a few streets over. A quick supper, of course. After all, Aziraphale and Crowley both had things they were looking forward to back at the shop.

The pub normally only served beer, but if the publican was surprised to find that his menu did in fact list a very particular vintage of sweet red Italian wine, the man said nothing about it. He just went back in the back, found a dusty bottle where none had been yesterday, and brought it out to the two gentlemen in the corner table who had assured him it would be there.

The publican knew one of the men—Mr. Fell, the fellow who ran the big red bookshop on the corner—and he’d seen the other one of them around Soho over the years, too. A more gossip-hungry person would have eavesdropped on their tipsy conversation, which wouldn’t have been hard. For all their theatrical shushing, they were both being rather loud. The publican, however, was not a nosy man. There were other tables to tend to, and it was none of his business what those two were celebrating. Still, he would have had to be made of stone not to have smiled just a little at the way the two of them laughed together. He had no earthly idea what they were laughing _about,_ but it didn’t matter. Probably a lot of old in-jokes, as incomprehensible to outsiders as another language or a code.

Likewise, if the proprietor of a particular Burlington Arcade teahouse found herself surprised to be still open for business at ten o’clock at night, she didn’t comment on it either. Only two customers stopped by that late anyway, and one of them was a regular, a Soho businessman who always tipped well. In publishing, she thought. He always came here alone, but today he had a friend following along at his heels, some beanstalk of a man dressed all in black who only smiled when he thought no one was looking directly at him. In an amazing coincidence, the specific pastries the two men had come there to purchase were the last baked goods she still had unsold from the morning. Eight English madeleines, miraculously still fresh. The proprietor packaged them up in two tidy parcels, tied them up with ribbon in a neat bow, and sent the tipsy gentlemen off on their way.

Madeleines, Aziraphale announced once they were alone again, tasted even better when one was just the slightest bit wine drunk. Although he had never eaten a madeleine while sober, Crowley found himself inclined to agree. They demolished the first box within minutes of returning home—well, to the shop—downstairs at the little table in the back room. Aziraphale _also_ announced that they tasted better still with tea, but they never got a chance to test that theory. The second box of cakes went untouched and the pot of tea grew cold on the table, though it wasn’t a matter of disinterest. Crowley, as he’d discovered, liked the taste of desiccated coconut a lot more than he’d been expecting to… he just liked it better when he got to taste it straight from Aziraphale’s lips.

They made love— _had sex_ a second time before the night was over. No ropes this time, just the two of them in Aziraphale’s bed. It was simpler the second time, more like what they were used to. Excitement and novelty were great, but there was something to be said for the thrill of familiarity, too. Crowley, for his part, was still stunned at his luck that this even got to _be_ familiar for him at all.

Later, much later at night indeed, after several hours spent doing nothing more than lying curled up in bed chatting and lounging about—hours very well spent, in Crowley’s opinion—Aziraphale rolled over and suggested they have some champagne.

“We had our sweet red already, and I know that’s the tradition,” Aziraphale said, waggling his eyebrows like some sort of ridiculous caricature of a person, “but I _do_ have a bottle I’ve been saving all year.”

“I think that’s a fine idea.” Crowley paused. “After all, we _are_ celebrating.”

It was safe to mention the celebration, that had… that had always been the case. They’d been talking around the purpose of the visit all night, like they did every century. Just so long as no one ever mentioned the specifics, as long as they never put a name to this thing, then—

Aziraphale kissed him on the forehead and slipped out of the bed. “Quite right. The Arrangement has survived a lot. It’s outlasted more than a few human kingdoms and dynasties. We’ve earned a bit of a treat.”

_What the fuck?_

“Right, right,” Crowley finally managed. Then he dared to say a little more. “Eight hundred years. S’a long time.”

“And eight of these little social calls, now,” Aziraphale said, slipping on his dressing gown. He caught sight of Crowley’s stunned expression and paused. “Did you think I hadn’t noticed? Twenty years into each century. You haven’t missed a single one.”

Crowley’s mouth opened and shut, but no sound came out. He knew Aziraphale _knew_ why they did this, but it was still shocking to hear him say as much out loud.

“Have I…” Aziraphale began, his expression falling, “Did I read too much into it? Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything…”

“Nine,” Crowley blurted, finally.

“Nine?”

“You said there were eight social calls like this,” he said. “There were nine.”

Aziraphale looked at him, perplexed. “How do you figure that there were nine? Eight centuries. Eight visits, including today.” Crowley watched as Aziraphale did the math in his head, then wrinkled his nose. “You’re not counting the siege of Troia, are you?”

“I am,” Crowley said, sitting up a little higher on the pillows. “1020 was the first one.”

“That one doesn’t count,” Aziraphale sniffed, stepping into his slippers.

“It was a social call. We drank to celebrate the Arrangement. It counts. There’ve been nine.”

“But in 1020, we hadn’t planned to both end up at the same place again! That’s how you talked me into agreeing to this whole scheme, if you’ll recall. 1020 was an accidental meeting turned… fortuitous. The next eight times were on purpose.” Aziraphale huffed out a breath. “It matters, doing a thing on purpose.”

Crowley’s throat felt dry by the time he spoke again. “Eight it is, then.”

The angel smiled at him and headed for the bedroom door. “Wait right here. I’ll be back up with the bottle in just a moment.”

Once he’d been left alone, Crowley’s thoughts began to race. Twisting the angel’s words this way and that, trying to find the meaning behind them. Trying to find the significance behind why he said them at all. Aziraphale had just started a conversation that for centuries Crowley had thought was off-limits. His head was spinning with the possibilities. If this was allowed…

What other kinds of things could they say to each other, now?

Sometimes, on quiet nights these past three lonely summers when Crowley had been off in Moscow, he would wander off on his own. Go for a walk and clear his head. Go somewhere quiet, somewhere away from the noise and bustle of the palace, the city, and all those people. It was so dark there at night, and the sky above him looked absolutely limitless. Every star, all those volatile beauties he used to help build, was now a bittersweet reminder. Of what he’d lost, of who he was now… of the questions he had for the future.

Even still, he couldn’t look away.

He didn’t remember much about Heaven, but Crowley remembered that he had worked with other people. Not that it mattered much now. While he did recognize a few other demons as former Starmakers who had Fallen with him, he avoided them as much as he avoided any other demon. Crowley _definitely_ didn’t let on that he used to know them. Even though everyone’s memories of Heaven were scrambled, bringing up anything that had happened Before was a quick way to find someone’s claws at your throat.

Most of the others in the workshop hadn’t Fallen, though, so he assumed that they were probably still Up there. Sometimes Crowley idly wondered whether the forges were even still lit these days, or if all of the angels in his former department had been pulled away to other bureaucratic tasks by now.

Regardless of what might be happening in Heaven, though, Crowley knew that the stars were repopulating somehow. Stars died, and from that death new stars were born. If they really were propagating themselves up there, no outside hand to guide them, to plan for them… Crowley thought he might actually be prouder of that development than he was of the specific stars he’d built in the Beginning. He liked the idea of it, that the sky had become some vast, wild garden—once meticulously kept, groomed, and plotted out, now abandoned to its own devices. Nature wresting control from the Gardener’s hands. Weeds growing thick and vivid alongside orchids and roses, all the more beautiful for the chaos from which it bloomed.

But then again, Crowley supposed he might have just been thinking about the Earth. All its wild beauty exploding out from what used to be a walled Garden. Sometimes, Crowley was even proud his role in that development, too.

On those long walks below that Russian sky, Crowley sometimes found himself feeling very old indeed. He was immortal, but his celestial creations were not. Like the humans, stars were born and grew and died. Crowley stayed exactly as he was. If he lucked out, if he were to somehow never be killed, he would exist forever. He wondered if he would outlive his stars, the ones he had put in the sky with his own hands. If he’d live long enough to see all the ones he’d formed burn out until there would be nothing left in the sky to prove he’d once been Up there at all. He might even live long enough to see _all_ of the stars burn out. To watch as the sky slowly emptied, leaving only cold darkness above. It wasn’t a version of eternity he liked contemplating.

Other times, he felt a bit presumptuous worrying about any of that at all. He’d chosen such a dangerous sort of life for himself, even by demonic standards. Why should he fixate on how the stars would die someday when he himself might be snuffed out tomorrow?

That was part of the reason he could still enjoy looking at his stars, even though they brought back memories of loss and anger. The stars were bright and furiously alive… and, at least for today, so was Crowley. Some of the stars up there only existed because _Crowley_ existed. She may have cast him out, but She hadn’t erased his work. Even now, his signature still marred the face of Heaven itself. He couldn’t read it anymore, since his old name had been plucked from reality itself and Forgotten, but he still recognized the hand that shaped it as his own. Even if no one else could tell, Crowley knew that it was there.

He thought a lot about Aziraphale, too, on those nights when he looked up at the stars. Well. To be fair, he thought about Aziraphale a lot, anyway. But on those nights, specifically, he thought about how Aziraphale… didn’t know.

Crowley had never told Aziraphale about what he’d done Before. That was one of the few hard rules Crowley had established on his own for their long companionship, totally outside of all the ones Aziraphale had come up with. They never talked about the Fall, and they never talked about Before. Crowley hadn’t liked the idea of Aziraphale thinking of him as an ex-angel in any detail, and didn’t want to hear any of his pity for the life Crowley had lost.

He also didn’t want to listen to Aziraphale repeat the party line to him, some defense of God’s Plan and Heaven’s judgement. Crowley was fine with all the friendly insults, all the “foul fiends” and “wicked serpents” Aziraphale had sent his way over the years. Even if those comments were designed to convince Aziraphale that the two of them were fundamentally different, or to keep them in their places as adversaries, he could take it. What he didn’t think he could take was hearing Aziraphale tell him directly that he thought Crowley deserved to Fall… or, worse, that he hadn’t.

So, to avoid all of that, Crowley hadn’t ever told Aziraphale that he used to be a Starmaker. Aziraphale might have guessed by now, though Crowley wasn’t sure. He had picked up on Crowley’s interest in astronomy, at least, but he’d never been _told._ In Crowley’s experience, the difference between something being known and something being _said_ was critical. And even if he did know Crowley’s old role somehow, he didn’t know _which_ stars Crowley had made. When Aziraphale looked up at the night sky, he couldn’t see Crowley’s signature. A few of Crowley’s stars had already died, and Aziraphale hadn’t even known that they _meant_ something. He hadn’t gotten to know them before they were gone.

But… maybe things were different now. Maybe the rules were starting to change. After all, for the last eight hundred years, neither of them had ever dared to say the reason for these anniversaries out loud. They never named this thing, never let it seem to be more than a happenstance meeting. Generic celebration, an excuse to get drunk, and nothing more. Aziraphale had broken that rule tonight. Here he was, mentioning the siege of Troia, that spring when he’d finally agreed to the Arrangement. Counting the years, arguing semantics.

If they’d survived that rule being broken, maybe… Maybe Crowley could break another one. On purpose, even. Maybe he could tell Aziraphale to look up, point out each one of the stars he had shaped in his hands. And then maybe, the next time they were separated, Crowley could look up at night and know that when Aziraphale did the same, he would be thinking of the hands that put them there.

Crowley looked across the bedroom and saw the walls twitch (far less unsettling now than it had been the first time he’d seen the shop do that unprompted), expanding and making room for the roof access hatch to appear. He knew he hadn’t miracled it, but it had emerged all the same. The shop did things like this sometimes, reacting to Aziraphale’s unspoken whims. This, though, was the first time it had ever listened like that to one of _Crowley’s._

Aziraphale noticed the change immediately when he walked back in the door, champagne in hand. “Did you do that?” He asked, gesturing towards the hatch with the hand that held the flutes.

“Nope,” Crowley said, shrugging. “But… How d’you feel about drinking on the roof?”

“Won’t it be cold?” Aziraphale asked, eyes flicking back down to Crowley. “It’s November.”

“Warmer here than in Russia,” Crowley answered. “It’ll be fine if I put my trousers and coat back on first.”

“Well… alright,” Aziraphale said, setting the bottles down on top of the chest. “But let’s at least take the quilts.”

“Bundle me up to your heart’s content, angel,” Crowley teased, and slipped out of bed to get dressed.

Crowley should have seen it coming, really. Shouldn’t have gotten his hopes up over nothing. But he’d been so excited that it hadn’t occurred to him to think of this in logical terms. By the time they were both clothed and wrapped up in Aziraphale’s fussy blankets, Crowley was genuinely surprised to look up at the sky and see… nothing. Just clouds. This was London, not Moscow, and he should have known better than to expect a clear sky. And besides, the gas streetlamps below were bright enough to hide any stars that might have tried to peek out through the ever-present haze of smog.

In record time, he lost his nerve.

But perhaps it was better this way, honestly. Crowley didn’t even know how he would have gone about broaching the topic in the first place, and now he didn’t have to worry about it. He could tell Aziraphale later. Next century, maybe. 1920, when they did this again.

And it wasn’t like there was a lack of things to talk about up on the roof. Buzzed on champagne, they laughed and reminisced and even flirted a bit, even though technically they were outside the shop. A bent rule, that one, if not totally broken. It was probably fine. Bundled as they were in Aziraphale’s quilts, Crowley felt they probably looked more like an ambulatory pile of laundry than they did people. Aziraphale even dared to hold Crowley’s hand under the blankets, swapping hands every few minutes so the one he used to hold his champagne flute wouldn’t get too cold. It was everything he could have hoped for and more.

When the sun rose, as it eventually had to, Aziraphale whispered to him not to worry about tidying up before he left. Even still, Crowley dragged the bundle of quilts down the ladder into the flat with him and dropped them on the stripped bed. He stayed long enough to get himself a searing, dizzying kiss goodbye. In that room, still heavy with the lingering scents of sex and rosewater, it was enough to make his head spin.

Crowley debated staying longer still, but there were their rules to consider. That, and common sense. Every second he stayed in London was a second he risked Hastur catching him away from Moscow. He mumbled his goodbyes, accepted their uneaten second box of madeleines that the angel pushed into his hands, and all but sprinted out of the shop’s back door.

Right, so he might have made things more difficult for himself by staying this long. And by using so many minor, fiddly little miracles while he was here. But Crowley was nothing if he wasn’t an optimist, and even as he darted around the clusters of early morning travelers on London’s roads hissing panicked swears under his breath, Crowley was busy trying to figure out how to salvage the situation.

There were two methods Crowley knew of for long distance travel when human methods just weren't practical. Well, three, but flying wasn't really an option here, either. He needed to do this very quickly, and besides, his wings didn't tend to cooperate when he flew for longer than in relatively short bursts. It had been ages since he tried flying for more than a day, or really since he'd flown at all, but he remembered the way the scar tissue pulled and ached after being used for too long.

The trip into London had been relatively straightforward, but had taken a lot of power to accomplish. It had been just a matter of picking up the corner of space where he'd been standing and folding it over itself until he found himself standing approximately where he wanted to be instead. The ride had been smooth, and if the landing had been a little off kilter, Crowley blamed that wholly on the ground he'd landed on being soggy.

Now, if he wanted to conserve more power, there was another way to do it that was a bit slower (though only by seconds) and not quite as comfortable. It took a lot of power to bend space around himself, but a bit less was needed to instead move _himself_ through space. It was disorienting and turbulent, and came with a real possibility of over or under shooting his target, but Crowley was running out of time and energy and options.

If he was travelling along two points that were connected by a ley line, it was more reliable. As it happened, there _was_ such a connection between Moscow and London, and getting to the London end of it was as easy as walking to Trafalgar Square and facing the correct direction. Getting off at the right point would be the difficult part. The line kept going past Moscow, and never went directly through his rooms in the palace, so he’d need to time it right and fling himself back into physical space at the proper moment. He wished there were a way to connect any two points on the globe by way of energy, not just ones along the network of ley lines. However, until either he figured that out or humans figured out how to travel by flight, jumping through subatomic space was his best option.

Oh well. It hadn't ever discorporated him before.

When he reached the correct spot, Crowley took a moment to thank his past self for staying strong and tying his shoes like a human all week prior to his trip. If he’d used any more energy than he already had, this next bit would be very fucking uncomfortable, if not outright fatal for his corporation. Crowley held on tight to the twine tied around the package of sweets, tucked it and his hat up under his arm, and ducked into a deserted side street. Once he had made sure none of the humans were looking (and had made a very desperate wish that no demons were, either—which was a very different thing than _praying_ for the same outcome, thank you) Crowley reached down towards Hell and wrenched a bit of it up to meet him.

Power flared within him and _burned_ as it roared through his body like a conduit, his last dregs of energy evaporating away like water on a hot pan. He was ripped from the place he'd been standing and thrown, spinning, through infinite blackness like a musket ball whizzing out the end of a gun with a blast of powder at his back. It was terrifying and exhilarating and Crowley let himself scream as he hurtled towards his destination.

He needed to time this right. The safer option would be landing somewhere outside the city and walking back in, like he'd done when he arrived in London... but he was already feeling dizzy, and Crowley didn't trust himself not to pass out in the snow somewhere and freeze to death. Soon enough, he sensed his target approaching. With another agonizing dip into his empty, almost dried-out magic reserves, Crowley pushed himself off the course of the ley line and—

**Moscow, about 12 seconds after Crowley jumped**

—landed in a painful sprawl on a hard stone floor. He stood up quickly, swaying on his feet, and surveyed the area. This was definitely the palace, but a part he’d never been to before. He’d gotten the right building but missed his rooms, which he supposed still counted as a victory.

Crowley groaned and headed for the door, holding onto furniture for support as he went. The box of madeleines bobbed against his leg in his slack grip, but he managed not to drop them. As he walked, Crowley tried to get his bearings. There was a plain table and a set of chairs here, but nothing in the way of decor. It seemed to be part of the servants’ quarters, luckily empty for the moment— _except_ for the footsteps approaching the door for the other side. Shit.

He stood up to his full height and tried to look like he wasn't about to pass out. Crowley was, of course, going to pass out. There was no _maybe_ about it, the only question was when. But no one else needed to know that.

The person who pushed open the door was definitely human. A woman in her thirties, one of the staff who had been working in his part of the palace since he'd been here. He recognized her, but couldn’t place anything in the way of a name. She was one of the ones he’d wondered about before he left, though, when he’d considered the possibility Hastur had put humans there to watch him. He was almost certain she was some kind of Satanist, not because of anything she’d done but just on the basis of how many Satanists Crowley had met in his time. Just like Aziraphale had a knack for picking the devout out of a crowd, Crowley could recognize the ones who liked their spirituality flavored with blasphemy. Most of them were alright, if a bit weird, which is how he felt about most religious people on both sides… but some of them could be unpleasant and fanatical.

As Crowley watched the human take in his appearance—disheveled, probably faintly smoking, reeking of brimstone—he wondered what kind she would turn out to be. As it happened, he didn't have long to wait.

Her eyes first widened as she looked at him in shock, then narrowed in contemplation. Finally, recognition lit up across her face and—oh, bugger it, she was bowing.

“My Lord,” she said, keeping her eyes low.

That was… less than ideal. He'd been hoping to get pinged as an occultist, something he might have even been able to spin to help his assignment here. Unfortunately, she seemed to have deduced something much closer to the truth, even though Crowley _knew_ his eyes and tattoo were both covered and that he wasn't scaly anywhere besides his feet... which meant she probably had already met another demon before. Not great. Fuck, Hastur had _definitely_ had him under observation here, but at least his spy apparently hadn’t known who or what Crowley really was before this moment.

“Go on, up you get,” he sighed.

“Can I help you, my Lord?” Hastur's Human asked, smiling in quiet glee as she obeyed and stood upright. Signs were pointing towards the _‘a-bit-too-interested-in-demons’_ end of the spectrum, then. Normally, that was something Crowley found terribly off-putting, but right now, he could work with it.

Thinking as fast as he could with so little energy, Crowley came up with a plan. Well, it was less a _plan_ and more of a thing he was going to attempt. Hastur probably didn't check in with his humans daily, as the Duke had a poor grasp of Earthly time in increments smaller than about a week. He also probably hadn't given her a way to contact him directly, as he loved ominously appearing before his underlings by surprise almost as much as he loved maiming the ones who failed him.

So, Crowley probably had time to go unconscious for a bit without Hastur getting alarmed. Probably. Not a guarantee by any means, but a gamble he thought he might win. Crowley could wipe her memory of anything untoward tomorrow, once he’d had the chance to regain some of his strength, but if he tried _anything_ before then he’d probably fall over where he stood. If he could stall her until then, keep her from reaching out to Hastur for the next twenty-four hours, he’d be good. She’d report back later that all was all expected and Crowley’s field trip to London would go undetected. Probably.

Crowley gripped the back of the chair harder as he felt himself tipping forward. He did his best to make it look like some kind of ominous lean instead of a stumble.

“As it happens, human,” he said, letting his voice pitch lower into a growl, “you can.”

“Tell me what I can do, my Lord. My Master never told me there were… others here, but I would gladly render aid however I am needed.”

“I require supplies for my work. Gather them for me and bring them to my chambers... starting with two pots of coffee, a dish of honey, and... um. A knife. Biggest, nastiest one you can find.”

He absolutely did not need the knife, but he thought asking for it would keep her curious and a bit worried, which, judging by her expression, it had. The real purpose of asking for the knife was to distract from the fact that he’d asked for honey with his coffee, which actually _was_ a necessity. Whoever roasted the beans for the palace always burned them and made it come out far too bitter. But Hastur’s Human was watching him now, and he had to maintain his demonic image, so... knife.

Hastur’s Human swallowed and bowed again, turning to go back the way she came. Crowley waited until her footsteps had faded, and then exited. As he’d suspected, he had missed his rooms by only a floor, and he was able to sneak upstairs and inside without attracting further attention.

Crowley collapsed into his desk chair and scribbled something down on a piece of paper, then gave into the rare urge to blink. The next thing he knew, Hastur’s Human was in the room and arranging two coffee pots, a dish of honey, and a wicked looking dagger on the desk in front of him. Apparently, he’d fallen asleep sitting upright.

“You have done well, human. I have prepared a list for you.” He slid it towards her. “Bring me these things at dawn, along with two more pots of coffee. Let no one know what you are doing, and attend your other duties so as not to attract attention from those who would oppose us. Our mutual friend,” he added with emphasis, heroically managing not to make a face at using that description for his boss, “has assured me that you were good at your job. You receive your final task tomorrow.”

The human scanned over the list and nodded. There was an expression of reverent pride on her face. “It shall be done, my Lord. Some of these things may prove difficult to locate, but I have faith in the Evil One and his favor.”

“Yes, sure. We all do. The Evil One is with us all, isn't he?” The broad hand motions were probably too much, he was probably laying it on too thick, but Crowley was operating with the brain power of a drunk. Fortunately, he was also operating with the same confidence as one, too. “I trust you shall succeed, true believer that you are. After all, you found such a menacing looking knife in, what?” Crowley checked his pocket watch. “Seven minutes?”

She smiled and ducked her head. “I already owned it, my Lord. It was my grandfather's sacrificial knife, and he passed it on to me.”

Crowley nodded, chin tipping lower and lower to his chest each time, his eyes heavy. He shook himself out of it. “Love a good family heirloom story. What a good little Satanist you are. Anyway, much to do. Evil to plot and all that. Thanks for doing the errands, see you in the morning. This should go without saying, but don’t open this door before then or you will be devoured. Ta.”

As she fled the room, Crowley sank back into his chair and deflated. The note had been theatrics, too, a sort of incomprehensible scavenger hunt of nonsense items to keep her busy until she came back for his wakeup call and he could remind her that the only demon she had ever encountered was Duke Hastur. That the red-headed man she’d seen down in the servants quarters the day before had very obviously been human. He’d been doing something very mundane, too, like looking for someone to help him with an overly smoky fireplace in his rooms… or something like that. A better cover story would probably make itself known after Crowley got the chance to rest a bit.

Crowley made himself eat and drink before he passed out. The coffee was predictably bitter, but the honey helped. He ate two of the madeleines, their sugar providing him the tiny boost he needed to double-check his defenses. The wards only covered his rooms, but he’d placed alarms all along the perimeter of the palace grounds. He’d copied a lot of the design of the spellwork based on what he’d seen at the bookshop, and while it wouldn’t keep any demons _out_ (that would be very difficult to explain to management), he would be woken if one of them made an appearance anywhere near the palace in person. As for the door itself, he secured it the human way: by locking it and shoving a chair under the handle.

His rooms were a mess, still stinky and lightly charred, and so was his body. Crowley could take care of all of that in the morning, though. Right now, he was going to strip naked, take a moment to appreciate how deliciously sore he was in a few places he couldn’t blame on the teleportation, and wriggle under the covers for a well-earned torpor. He let himself relax for a moment, let himself savor the lingering smell of rosewater he could taste on his tongue beneath all the brimstone, and then shut his eyes.

Crowley’s last thought, before slipping into a dreamless sleep not unlike a coma, was one of giddy and delirious elation. He’d gotten away with it. He’d won. Though he’d miss Aziraphale like a severed limb tomorrow, the time they’d gotten to have today would haunt his memories like the most welcome of ghosts.  


* * *

As far as Crowley knew, Hastur never found out that Crowley had ever left Moscow. He assumed that if he _had_ been caught, he’d _know._ After a few weeks had passed and no brutal torture session had manifested, Crowley thought it was safe to consider himself in the clear. It had only worked because of a string of lucky coincidences, but it _worked._

The Duke’s spy never bothered Crowley directly again after he tweaked her memories, though now that he _knew_ she’d been tasked with watching him, he felt her eyes on him everywhere he went. However, as uncomfortable as it had been to get confirmation that he had been spied on for three years, Crowley was grateful he’d found out the way he had. Now that he knew, he could alter his behavior while he was being watched. Do things that Hastur would interpret as loyal and demonic, but that wouldn’t out him as inhuman to any of the mortals.

He definitely didn’t want Hastur's Human figuring him out again. If she was willing to work under a nasty bastard like that—and on purpose, at that—she must have some strong aspirations of power, and Crowley did not want to be put in a position where she thought he might offer her a better deal than her current master. She did have her uses, though, in reporting on his activities to Hastur. Helping Crowley make Downstairs trust that he was every bit as scheming and wicked behind their backs as he was when he was recounting his deeds to them in person. It was a bit of extra work, but Crowley hadn’t ever minded playing a part. If it worked, it would draw Hell’s suspicions away from him further still and give him the freedom to keep working on projects of his own creation.

Crowley was even grateful for the fact he hadn’t known for certain about the spying until after he got back from London. If he'd known for sure before he left, he might have deemed the risk too great and never taken the trip. Now that he’d done it, though, Crowley knew that any risk would have been worth it. Worth that most spectacular anniversary date with the angel. Even though Aziraphale wasn’t calling it an anniversary _or_ a date, his best friend definitely recognized the significance of the meeting in relation to their friendship. Had looked forward to it. Had missed Crowley while he was away. Crowley would risk _anything_ just to get to have that.

His assignment in Russia, like the rest of his assignments, eventually ended. Crowley arranged for his plants to be shipped, packed up his furniture into a storage void, and moved on to the next place they wanted him to go. His scheming in Moscow seemed to have worked, as Hastur’s scrutiny dwindled as the years passed by. Or maybe the Duke had just gotten bored. It was hard to tell. Either way, Crowley found himself slipping into familiar patterns again. Regular trips to London resumed, rarely longer than a year in between, with visits to the bookshop at least once a week while he was there. Tons of sex, too, nearly every time they met. Crowley was the luckiest demon to ever live.

The ropes weren’t made into a permanent addition to their sex life, though Aziraphale did ask for them sometimes. The angel had been right, the ropes were a good symbol. When they were on, Crowley had an easier time making choices instead of freezing. He let himself indulge a bit more in his own desires, intense as they could be, in the knowledge that Aziraphale _wanted_ that kind of intensity when the ropes were on. The limitless depths of his own neediness still frightened him, and he struggled sometimes with the terror that he’d ask for too much or the wrong thing and be pushed away. However, given that it hadn't happened yet in thirty… forty… _fifty_ years, Crowley gradually started to ignore the voice that told him to never ask for anything at all.

They tried it once the other way around, with Crowley in the role of the one getting tied up and seen to. Strangely enough, he'd had absolutely no issue handing over control to Aziraphale in their gentle game of power exchange. That part had been completely fine. A lot of it was fine. Great, even. The sex was always good. He couldn’t complain about any of it. But he had…

It had been _fine._ Really, it had. It had just… prickled beneath Crowley’s skin a bit to be restrained. Like that. To be belly up and vulnerable. Not that he thought that Aziraphale would—would suddenly attack him, or anything so. So _ridiculous_ as that. He just didn't like the idea of not being able to get to his feet if he needed to, if… if Heaven or Hell came calling. Ropes or—or even chains, like the set Aziraphale had worn to bed on one very memorable occasion, couldn't really hold either of them back, not if they really wanted to break free, but it would require time to do. Only a second really, but... but what if that were all it would take?

So, they'd tried it just that once, and Crowley was still somewhat mortified years later that Aziraphale had picked up on his anxiety and banished the ropes. Brushed the hair back from his sweaty face. Asked if he wanted to stop. Kissed him when Crowley had shaken his head and quietly, shamefully begged him not to stop, not ever. Gathered Crowley up in his arms and cradled him as they fucked. Slow and gentle, like Crowley was something fragile.

He’d not said a word about it after that, but Crowley had gotten the distinct impression that Aziraphale had been... disappointed. Rationally, he knew that the angel wasn’t like that, that he had probably only been upset because they’d done something Crowley hadn’t enjoyed—and wasn’t that just a _thing?_ Aziraphale was always encouraging him to speak up and ask for what he wanted and give his preferences, but Crowley couldn't just _say_ that his only real preference was for _Aziraphale,_ could he? It was safer not to question, not to ask for anything, because that way, there were no wrong answers.

Still, a part of him wondered sometimes if the disappointment had been because Crowley had made a fuss about things. It hadn’t been that bad, really, and he could get over himself if Aziraphale ever wanted to give it another shot.

Aziraphale never suggested Crowley wear the ropes again, but thankfully, he didn’t stop the rest of it—the pinning, the holding, the grabbing his hair. Crowley would have missed those bits. He never minded being restrained when it was Aziraphale’s hands holding him. Liked it a lot, actually. It wasn’t a distinction that he felt like he could explain, not without saying too much else, so he was relieved Aziraphale had figured it out on his own.

Crowley wasn't an idiot. He knew that everything he and Aziraphale built together was contingent on Crowley behaving himself. If he became too much of a risk, if he asked for too much or said the wrong kind of thing, Aziraphale couldn’t justify to himself the need for them to stay together. As friends, as participants in the Arrangement, in their affair. Crowley could only play if he played by the rules. That was how it had always been.

As one who had Fallen, Crowley knew he wasn’t capable of being forgiven, even for the smaller sins, but he thought that sometimes, maybe, Aziraphale didn’t notice his mistakes… Or maybe he did notice them, but didn’t think they were mistakes? Crowley didn't know. It was confusing.

Aziraphale surrounded himself with many uncrossable lines, and Crowley walked around them as carefully as he could. He knew that if he stepped the wrong way, he would lose his position here at the angel’s side. The tricky part was that some of those lines had been drawn in such a way that Crowley could not see them. It was the terror of a missed stair in the darkness when he stumbled over what he thought was one of them... only to discover that there hadn't been a line there at all. To realize he was still standing on solid ground, safe and wanted.

But maybe he could make it work. Maybe he was handling this okay. Aziraphale was having fun, their bosses didn’t know... and sometimes when Crowley fucked up in small ways, like he had with the ropes, Aziraphale seemed happy to let him try again. Seemed willing to pet his hair and kiss his cheeks when he got tongue tied and overwhelmed, which was another thing that Crowley had _no_ idea how to deal with. The nonsexual intimacy, that casual tenderness, always had twisted his head (and heart) up worse than the sex ever could.

If heaven existed—the human idea of it, not the empty white vacuum Upstairs—Crowley thought it might look a lot like this. Friendship with Aziraphale, and time to enjoy it. The knowledge that Aziraphale wanted him around, at least for now, at least within the usual rules they had operated under since Eden. The knowledge that sometimes Aziraphale thought about him while they were apart.

 _This must be what love was,_ Crowley thought one day, decades into their new Arrangement. Aziraphale wanted him happy and safe, and really, wasn’t that what Crowley wanted, too? It might not be romantic love, but it was love of a sort, he was certain.

As years melted into decades, Crowley dug his claws into that love and promised himself he’d defend it with everything he had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! I posted this chapter a week-and-a-bit early. To make things a bit easier on myself in terms of scheduling, I will be putting updates for Gentle Night on pause for the rest of December. I’ll see y’all here again in the new year with chapter 18 on **Thursday, January 7th, 2021.** I will try to keep up with WIP Wednesday previews on Tumblr, though who among us even truly knows what a “Wednesday” is anymore? (oh, and I maaaay post some one-shots here soon, too...)
> 
>  **A note about the next section:** I know some of y’all are feeling a bit angst-averse right now, and with good reason, so I thought I’d give advance warning. There’s a big timeskip coming, and chapter 18 will start the section of this fic set in 1862. Pre-Holy Water Fight 1862, but uh. Yeah, that’s coming. So are all those other alarming tags on the top of the fic we haven’t gotten to yet. Angst Ahoy.  
> Each chapter will start with a detailed author’s note and content warning section, like always, and you’re also always free to ask me (in comments, on tumblr, by discord, by carrier pigeon, etc) about specific triggers or topics that have you concerned. You also won’t hurt my feelings if you need to duck out of reading for a bit. Take care of yourselves, y’all.
> 
> Happy Hanukkah to those of you who are beginning your celebrations tomorrow night. To everyone else, I hope you have a merry Christmas, joyous Yule, happy Kwanza, and/or generally enjoyable December. I will not be doing any New Year well-wishing because, frankly, it seems like tempting fate at this point.  
> Stay safe, friends. <3


	18. Doors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _(This chapter begins, as it will end, with a door.)_
> 
> Crowley always laughed at those bits—at the horns and hooves, yes, but also at how showy the humans made the entrance to his workplace look. The door he’d just exited, the door he was straining his ears to listen for in case it pounded open behind him, was just a door. A regular, unassuming, unmarked door. Did it have a general aura of malice to it? Yes. Cold seeping out from under it like some awful draft? Yes. Vaguely sticky to the touch? Yes. Rusted on the hinges so that whenever anyone opened it, the damned thing screamed like someone having their balls lovingly crushed in a vise? _Yes._ But, it at least wasn’t on fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, just as a heads up. This chapter is really heavy. We’re getting to some of the more intense content up in the tag list: _“Implied/Referenced Torture,” “Aftermath of Torture,” “Blood and Injury,”_ and _“Non-Graphic Violence,”_ specifically, as well as some we’ve seen before like _“Trauma,” “Anxiety,” and “Self-Esteem Issues.”_
> 
>  **Content Notes:** Off-page violence, left intentionally vague and never directly described.  
> The aftermath of physical abuse & torture, including a metric shit ton of fear and some bruises, blood, and broken bones. None of it is life threatening, and most of it is able to be healed, but it’s still painful and traumatic. I’m putting a quick context spoiler in the endnote describing what the injuries are.  
> Heavy pollution and difficulty breathing because of it.  
> A character blaming himself (in part) for being hurt, and blaming himself (a lot) for reacting to being hurt.  
> A character concealing injuries from physical abuse.
> 
> Chapter-specific sex acts: none.  
> There will be sex next chapter, though. Kind of the comfort to the hurt.
> 
> I am not going to be able to write context spoilers for everything in this section in enough detail for it to be useful. Even though I’ve run up against Ao3’s character limit in the author notes twice before and prevailed, I fear that this task is beyond me.  
> So, I’ll say this: If you need additional context for something before you decide to read, please reach out to me on Tumblr, Discord, or in the comments and I’ll explain anything you need. Want to find out which chapter they have the Holy Water fight in so you can hold off reading until they’ve made up again? I’ve got you. Understandably worried about something in the tags or the content notes above? I feel you, and I will give you additional information so you can decide if you can read right now/ever.  
> Life’s too short and shitty to get burned by a fic you’re already 133k deep into. The ending is hopeful, but we are entering into a rough patch, and if you need to pause until the hope gets here, I understand. The world is really heavy right now— _a statement I wrote in advance of my country undergoing an attempted coup yesterday, actually, holy fuck_ —so please take care of your mental health.

**London, 1862**

In the not-too-distant future, trains would be running underneath London itself. Unseen by anyone aboveground, millions of Londoners would soon be able to cross the city in record time, roaring along encased in steel monstrosities powered by steam and fire, all without a single _fucking_ horse in sight. As horrible as the humans could be to each other, Crowley thought that sometimes they did genuinely get it right.

Because nothing he found exciting could ever be allowed to just _be,_ Hell had moved itself into one of those first construction tunnels like mold makes a home on bread. Crowley supposed he should be grateful his lower-downs hadn’t yet figured out that London was also working on getting themselves a proper sewage system set up. Otherwise, they probably would have picked one of the _other_ construction tunnels to set up shop in and he’d be having to do this up to his ankles in shit.

Hard-packed dirt shifting beneath his shuffling steps, Crowley thought inexplicably of those plays the humans used to put on in the Middle Ages, those scenes set up on wagons to retell bits from the Bible with egregious levels of inaccuracy (even by mortal standards). One of the wagons in the procession always had the Hellmouth, some garish flaming maw opening into eternal torment. Sometimes it even had real fire, which wasn’t _safe_ by anyone’s estimation but it did at least shake up the monotony of living in the fucking _Middle Ages._ That was, of course, the whole point of the Hellmouth. The spectacle of it. Well, that and the fear. From its lips, humans costumed like demons spilled out to shock the illiterate masses watching into good behavior.

Crowley always laughed at those bits—at the horns and hooves, yes, but also at how showy they made the entrance to his workplace look. The door he’d just exited, the door he was straining his ears to listen for in case it pounded open behind him, was just a door. A regular, unassuming, unmarked door. Did it have a general aura of malice to it? Yes. Cold seeping out from under it like some awful draft? Yes. Vaguely sticky to the touch? Yes. Rusted on the hinges so that whenever anyone opened it, the damned thing screamed like someone having their balls lovingly crushed in a vise? _Yes._ But, it at least wasn’t on fire.

The most unsettling thing about the door to Hell was that it was unlocked. It was underground and tucked away because Hell liked to hide itself from human eyes, but if anyone went looking for it, it wanted to make it easy for them to take that last step and walk inside. A locked door would be a stumbling block at the finish line, and that just wouldn’t do. The road to damnation should be as smooth as possible. Slick, even. A lot of the humans who ended up Down there never even noticed that was where they were going.

As for the demons on the other side of that door… why would there even need to be a lock? Hell owned them all so fully, inside and out, that it didn’t need something as trivial as a lock to keep them in their place. No matter where any demon went, Hell would always be with them.

Crowley walked through the tunnel and reminded himself that he was fine. Nothing was broken that couldn't be fixed. He was alive. He could _walk_ out on his own two legs, shaky as they were, which in his opinion was a good sign. There had been times he hadn’t been able to, times he’d had to turn into a serpent and crawl his way out. Yes. Walking, legs, all good things.

He tried not to take inventory of all the places that hurt, which was both easy and difficult. It was easy in that he more or less hurt _everywhere_ and only a few places stood out as being particularly agonizing. It was difficult in that the power he called up to heal himself with drew attention to each bruise and fracture and laceration before it soothed it away.

A memory of Aziraphale floated to the forefront of his distracted, hazy mind. The angel’s wrists. The bruises and scrapes Crowley had seen there in the lamplight of a shitty inn room in Paris. That had been the one and only time Aziraphale had ever let Crowley heal him. Aziraphale had seemed so surprised by the way it felt. Eyes wide, he had told Crowley that his infernal magic had felt like warm champagne buzzing under his skin.

 _Champagne._ Crowley tried to think only of champagne bubbles in that moment, gritting his teeth as he rode out the awkward, painful pop of his dislocated shoulder pushing itself back into place. He never felt the miracle itself when he healed his own corporation, only the shifting of muscle and bone, the heat of multiplying cells, hotter and sharper when the wounds were deeper. It occurred to him to wonder if he had ever been able to feel his own healing miracles at work, or if he had become so desensitized to them over time he no longer noticed.

He realized that could taste blood in his mouth. His tongue, he must have bitten his tongue at some point. Crowley called up another wave of infernal energy and healed that, too. Shifted his tongue back and forth inside his mouth, letting move between being forked and rounded and then forked again. Focused on the feeling of it as it slithered and split and fused together, testing to see that he’d fixed it completely. That was fine for now. He could hide the taste of the blood later, cover it up with cloyingly sweet wine or whisky that could burn the rest away. For now, he settled for spitting whatever was still in his mouth out onto the dirt floor of the tunnel.

If he were trying to cheer himself up, Crowley could comfort himself with the knowledge that it at least hadn’t been an official reprimand. It hadn’t been because he’d been caught slacking. He wasn’t going to be pulled out of London for this slip-up. This had just been random. It didn’t _mean_ anything. No greater scrutiny. No loss of privilege. Just another shitty day in Hell.

It wasn’t like the random ones were any less painful, of course—though it was hard to quantify these things, to rank what kind of agony is worse or better than another—but at least the random ones were usually over faster. In and out in just a few hours, rather than the days or weeks that real punishments could last for. The random ones could usually be escaped from, too. That’s what had happened just now. Crowley had seen an opening and ran for it, and the others eventually got bored of chasing him and went to go find someone else to dismember.

No one ran from the real ones, the punishments that they logged and filed with Dagon and got signed off by a supervisor. Crowley only ever saw two demons try running from one of those in all this time, and the first time had been more than enough to teach him he should always just go quietly and pray it would be over soon.

The only reason he’d ever consider it worth it to attempt running would be if Hell ever figured out the Arrangement. Might be able to provide something like a distraction that way, and besides, he’d already be fucked. How much worse could he make it for himself, really? Being discovered doing an angel’s blessings for him—or with said angel’s hands down his trousers—was already a scenario Crowley didn’t expect to survive.

Good thing, then, that he didn’t plan on letting anyone find out.

At a certain point, after he’d taken care of the worst of his injuries, Crowley stopped healing himself. There was still a lingering ache in his muscles, probably some bruising, but he’d done enough that he could walk without limping now. That mildly concerning wheeze from what passed for a lung in this corporation had stopped, too. The rest could wait. There was a mirror back at the house where he was staying, and he could prioritize what to heal next based on what had left a visible mark. He’d let the rest would heal on its own, without magic. It shouldn’t take too long, far faster than it would if he were a human, and he’d probably be asleep through it, anyway. Plus, it would help him to conserve just a bit more of his power. It’d be fine.

For the moment, he turned his attention to his clothes—mending the biggest rips and tears, banishing the worst of the stains—so he’d be reasonably presentable on the walk back to his lodgings. In some ways, Crowley understood that it was a pointless thing to do. These clothes were ruined, fit for nothing but a fire. He could turn human attention away from himself if he wanted, probably would regardless. Not a soul in London would notice if he walked down the street stark naked with a tail sprouting from his backside. Even still, he cleaned himself up a bit, if only to avoid feeling the muck clinging to his skin the whole walk back. Or the tacky pull of drying blood.

His clothes reeked of Hell, and the infernal miracles he’d spent to mend them were only making it worse. It was giving him a headache, but he knew it would be better once he was out of this construction tunnel and out in the fresh air. Not that Central London ever could really be said to have _fresh_ air, but even the foulest corner of Earth smelled better than it did Downstairs.

One particular recent summer came to mind, not four years ago. The humans, always terribly creative, named it _The Great Stink._ It was always nauseating near the river, especially in the summer, but that year the stench got so strong that everyone who was rich enough to travel flooded out of the city in droves. By the time Crowley had gotten some time free between assignments to travel to London, Aziraphale had already left. Closed up the shop to stay in some cozy cottage by the sea with some of his human writer friends. Crowley couldn’t blame him. He took up some petty temptations outside the city and waited for another opportunity.

A century ago, back before their affair started, Crowley might have dropped in uninvited to be a nuisance and pretend it was a chance meeting. It was harder to do that sort of a thing these days. They still maintained the _appearance_ of happenstance, but nothing was truly random anymore. They had to plan ahead as the bookshop and its layers of wards was really the only place safe enough to get up to the sort of tricks they enjoyed together now.

All that, and London _still_ smelled better than where he was running from. Well, not really _running,_ not anymore. He had let himself slow down a bit. At this point, he was just moving quickly and with purpose.

The door was quite a distance behind him now, and Crowley was beginning to be able to see a faint light up ahead. Thankfully, it was still about four months too early for the literal light at the end of the tunnel to turn out to be a train. It wasn’t dawn yet, and the ever-present miasma of smog that cloaked the city this century meant that moonlight wasn’t a likely contender, either. Judging by the sickly, almost greenish glow, Crowley guessed it was probably a gaslight.

The sight of it should have been encouraging, but all it did was remind Crowley that he was getting closer to humanity and his eyes were still bare. He patted himself down on sheer muscle memory, checking pockets and the vee of his waistcoat for a pair of sunglasses that weren’t there. The memory of snapping metal and crunching glass came back to him perhaps a second later.

Crowley made a twitching, impatient gesture with his hand and the world grew darker as a new set appeared on his face, transported from his lodgings. It cost him just a little less to do it that way instead of manifesting some from nothing, and he always had a few spare sets lying around for times like these. Whatever the reason, the other demons seemed particularly fond of breaking his glasses when they got the chance.

The idea of teleporting _himself_ back to his lodgings was an appealing one, but Crowley was wary of calling too much attention to his position while still this close to the entrance to his office. Besides, he couldn’t justify burning that kind of energy, not if he didn't want to have to put himself into some kind of a torpor straight after to make up for it. Tired as he was, he didn’t want to sleep yet, and he didn’t like the idea of draining himself to empty, especially not today. He didn’t want to be useless. Didn’t want to be _defenseless._

It was relief to finally step onto the street, but Crowley was still so tense that even the tap of his own boots on the cobblestones seemed dangerously loud. The fog was thick tonight, heavy and brownish and oily in a way that coated the back of his tongue with the acrid taste of coal smoke.

That was another one of his wiles backfiring on him, he supposed. Here he was, having claimed credit in Hell for this mess for nearly seven decades running. Though it had mostly been the mortals’ doing, and though they’d taken it so much further than even he could have imagined, Crowley would be lying if he told himself he’d had no hand in it. All the evils of mass-production and the assembly line. Industrialization. Steam power. The day-to-day banal cruelties wrought from the boss’s office upon the people on the factory floor. The poison in the air that blackened walls and clung to the inside of human lungs. Crowley supposed it was only fair he breathed it in, too. It provided a distraction from the taste of blood, and besides, it wasn’t like he’d _die_ from this. Worse, really, was the realization that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen stars over London.

Had he been a human, Crowley would have no way of seeing more than a few feet ahead of him. He’d be forced to follow the eerie, muted glow of the streetlamps and trust his memory to find his way back. He’d also have no way of knowing if he was alone. In a way, that was comforting. It made him feel protected, almost, like he could disappear into the night and no one could see him. Unfortunately, though, that feeling cut both ways. If Crowley could hide, so could someone else. Anyone could be out there hiding in a fog like this. Any _thing._

Crowley looked over his shoulder on reflex. The mouth of the construction tunnel gaped wide and dark and— _yes_ —empty.

Damned lucky, then, that demons weren’t bound by the same limitations as humans. All Crowley had to do was close his physical eyes and look around with his infernal senses. That was all it took to confirm that he was alone, that he hadn’t been followed. That he shouldn’t have let himself give into pointless fear. There was nothing hiding in the fog, human or inhuman, besides Crowley himself.

Well, himself and a few rats. As far as animals were concerned, rats were one of the species Crowley usually got on with reasonably well. Rats knew how to keep their mouths shut, unlike _some_ animals. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, were the biggest narcs She had ever come up with, and they didn’t even have the decency to be easily swallowable.

 _Pull yourself together,_ Crowley chided himself, looking once more over his shoulder.

No one disturbed him the rest of the walk back, and though the locks were heavy on the door to his Regent’s Park townhouse, the sound of them slotting into place behind him proved to be of little relief to his nerves. There were alarm spells around the perimeter, too, modeled after the ones Aziraphale had worked into the very bricks of the bookshop. Crowley didn’t stay anywhere without such precautions, even temporarily. Nothing had followed him, nothing was _here,_ but still Crowley found himself itching to stalk through the darkened hallways and see for himself.

This house had been his off-and-on London residence for the past twenty years, a place for him to come to whenever he could be here. It had been long enough that his neighbors had stopped thinking of Crowley as the interesting, reclusive bachelor of indeterminant age living in their midst and had come to accept him as a fixture on their street as ignorable as any streetlamp.

As this was one of the rare occasions where he’d been allowed to return to the same dwelling for a few decades running, he’d taken the time to decorate the place a bit more than usual. Not for any sense of sentimentality, no, but because it was a chance to dress the set for his performance. Really sell the idea that he was some new money tosser living alone someplace clean and shiny and full of gaudy excess, if for no other reason than because it was a tiny, harmless challenge. It had given him a way to kill a few hours of his time, made him feel a bit more like he was blending in due to his own skill, his knowledge of humans and their society rather than having to redirect their minds. Plus, it tended to irritate any other demons who came calling.

Most of his temporary lodgings had been spare and forgettable, furnished with a few personal trinkets—maybe a few plants, if the lighting was good—and little else. He’d stayed in his fair share of inn rooms and hotels and tents and caves and shoddy old flats with drafty doors and stairs that creaked, so he wasn’t averse to roughing it. However, the human he was pretending to be these days was a wealthy man. All flash and no substance, eager to spend the money he had. In this specific time and place, such men did not live in Spartan houses.

Clutter was what was currently stylish, was what communicated money and influence, and so in service to his act, Crowley filled his dwelling near to bursting with all the tacky signifiers of Victorian taste. Paintings on the walls, statuettes and busts on the shelves. Globes and maps, a few old telescopes. Lamps with fragile, colorful glass. Some of them were his own possessions, things he’d packed away in storage voids when they were new and completely forgot he had them. By now, they were fashionably antique. The rest of it was either summoned or created. He’d done a good job, he thought. The interior of his lodgings spoke of expensive tastes and a life spent travelling.

This house had good light, too, at least in the conservatory in the back. The windows in there faced east, so the plants get to see the sun rise every dawn. Even though Crowley knew firsthand how painful those first rays could be, he also knew it was healthy for them. The plants were certainly thriving. They’d grown so large since he’d moved them here, swelling into verdant and towering behemoths in only a year or two.

It was comforting, almost, to be surrounded on all sides by such heavy foliage, like he was walking in his own private jungle. This room had become his favorite place to have his coffee in the mornings, to sit and read his newspaper at a little table with two chairs. Only one had ever been used, but he occasionally entertained the daydream that maybe someday that might change.

But that’s all it was, a daydream.

There were two aspects of this house that he didn’t let himself spend too much time thinking about. The first was a question, one he asked about most things he encountered in his life—What would Aziraphale think about this place? He didn’t dwell on it because it didn’t matter. The angel didn’t often visit Crowley’s lodgings, not even since the start of their affair. Why would he need to? They had the bookshop and its wards. Aziraphale would never see this place, and definitely not the inside of it… as much as Crowley thought he might actually like it here.

The second thing was a realization, though it was one that was tied up in knots around his question: Without trying to, or even being fully aware that he was doing it, he’d made this place look a bit like the bookshop.

Right now, though, in his advanced state of paranoia, the clutter didn’t feel stylish. Didn’t even feel familiar. Didn’t feel like a place he’d ever want the angel to see, didn’t feel like a place he even wanted to _be._ There was just so much—so much _stuff._ Mess. It crowded him on all sides, making the narrow hallways feel even more like they were suffocating him. There were too many doors, and Crowley opened all of them. Prowled from room from room to turn on every lamp, to flood the house with light. He stood there like a fool for a few moments, eyes stinging from the brightness, before he remembered that he was able to see in the dark just as easily as he could in the day.

 _It’s fine,_ he told himself. _I’m fine._

The letter was still sitting on his desk from this morning, the summons to his meeting Downstairs. Innocuous, by Hellish standards, though it still stank of brimstone all these hours later. It hadn’t given any indication of what would be waiting for him Down there, though that was more of a mark of Crowley’s own fault in judgement. A sign that he’d let himself get too cocky. He should at least burn the letter, though. Along with the clothes. It might reduce the smell a little, though by now it had probably already seeped into the upholstery.

Crowley built a fire in the hearth in the largest bedroom. Kindled it the human way. It was pragmatism, yes, a way of sparing power, yes, but it also gave him something to do with his hands. Something to hold in them so that for just a few minutes they wouldn’t shake, or at least not as much as they had been. The heat and light of it were a small comfort, and once it was big enough, Crowley forced himself to stop stalling.

Gloves first, one at a time. Boots, next, then stockings. Hat and coat. Cravat. Waistcoat. Shirt. Trousers. Every last stitch he’d been wearing today until he was naked down to skin and scales—save for his sunglasses. Those he folded and set aside, but did not burn. He packed so much material into the fire that he might have suffocated it, had there been any room left in his mind with which to consider that possibility. The only thing he thought about in the moment was the single desire to destroy the evidence, the stinking wreck of it all. He watched it all burn down to nothing and then fed his summons to the fire, too.

The mirror was in the corner. Huge, expensive. Gaudy. Garish. Crowley drifted towards it, knowing he had to look but hating the necessity of it. He wasn’t usually squeamish, but he found himself struggling to make himself look anywhere but into his own eyes in the reflection. If he looked anywhere else, as he knew he must, he would see the proof of the last few adrenaline-poisoned hours made concrete and real.

Crowley hadn’t had an official reprimand in seventy years, not since his cock-up in Stockholm, and he had been on fucking _edge_ ever since. Knowing another one was inevitable but never knowing when or for what reason it would come. And today hadn’t been quite what he’d been dreading, so it hadn’t even given him that perverse sense of relief that told him he only had to fear what was in front of him, not what was around the next corner. The threat of official punishment was _still_ looming over his head, because today hadn’t even counted.

It hadn’t been any sort of consequence for something he’d actually _done,_ or even something he failed to do. It had been completely, pointlessly _random._ Bored demons, looking for someone to hurt to pass the time. Wrong place, wrong time. Turned down the wrong hallway after turning in a report. Didn’t notice it wasn’t empty. Flinched when he should have run.

He didn’t know any of them, save one. That one he only knew from Before, and if he remembered Crowley, he never let on. It was fair, Crowley supposed. He himself remembered nothing about the other demon beyond a shadowy recollection of his face, a distorted sense of familiarity. Crowley thought he might have been one of the ones who used to sing in the Forge while he worked.

It didn’t matter. There was nothing left of music in him now.

The lower-downs knew, of course. Everyone _knew._ No sort of brutalization in Hell happened without an audience. Nobody got _privacy._ And nobody _ever_ intervened. The demons in charge let it happen because they wanted everyone miserable and terrified, and the rank-and-file were always just glad when it wasn’t them this time. Crowley himself should know. He’d worked there for close to six thousand years and never once tried to stop any of the casual cruelties he passed in the halls. Just looked away and walked faster.

Looking over the aftermath, Crowley found that it was… better than he’d thought, in some ways. Better, at least, than he’d feared. He’d taken care of the worst of it on the walk back. He was fine now. All he had left now were a few bruises and scrapes, superficial injuries that would heal well enough unattended. An all-over, pervasive soreness, but that was to be expected. Probably nothing that would scar, and even if it did, he could banish those easily enough once he’d had a chance to sleep this off and replenish his reserves of energy.

Crowley wasn’t opposed to scars on principle, not even on his own corporation. He’d let himself have one or two of those in his time, mementos of mundane injuries that he let heal slowly. The right sort of scar looked kind of cool, especially when he was playing at being a certain type of human. He got rid of them all sooner or later, most of the time because he’d gotten bored of them.

Aziraphale, it seemed, did not like scars. Not on his own corporation, since Crowley had never seen him wear one, nor on Crowley’s. They prompted the angel to fuss over him with something too close to pity for Crowley to tolerate.

Nothing from today would be allowed to scar, of course. He wouldn’t want Aziraphale to see them, to ask about them. _Crowley_ wouldn’t even want to see them. He loved Aziraphale, and there were things he would spare the angel when he could.

_Never let him know what it’s really like._

The only scars of Crowley’s that Aziraphale had never commented on, never tried to soothe, were the two on his back. The two he couldn't do much about. It was a relief, as to talk about those would be to talk about the Fall, which would be disastrous. Crowley didn’t try to hide them, though, and he was glad in a way that Aziraphale knew they were there. Like the fork in his tongue or the scales on his feet, he sometimes felt a fragile sort of contentment at letting certain hidden parts of himself be seen.

Even if certain other parts couldn’t ever be put on display.

As Crowley hid the lingering damage to his corporation behind a glamour, it occurred to him that he didn’t actually… know what to do next. In the past six millennia, he’d developed something of a routine in times like these. For afterwards. It went the same way every time. Heal himself, lock himself up in his lodgings, burn anything that still smelled like Hell, and drink himself into a stupor for a day or two. Resolve never to think about any of it again. Convince himself he was fine until he _was_ fine. Simple and straightforward, something he’d done probably dozens of times now, if not hundreds.

It was also something he couldn’t do, not this time. Something had changed in the last seventy years, something he’d never had to deal with when he was coming down from being punished—or just hurt for the Hell of it, not that there was much of a difference.

Aziraphale. Aziraphale was what was new here. They were due for another meeting tomorrow at nine—in just ten hours, a glance at the clock on the mantle told him. Crowley had never had to try to get himself back into normal, sociable shape in such a short time. He couldn’t just sleep this off, or drink himself halfway to discorporation until his mind shut off. It occurred to him that he could send a note and cancel, or delay, but then it occurred to him just as quickly that he didn’t want to do that. Crowley was _living in London_ right now, they were seeing each other at the bookshop once a week. He was _happy._ He didn’t want to waste the rest of his visit having a sulk.

Hell always took so much. The least they could do was let him have this.

It seemed that all there was for it was the simple matter of keeping himself occupied for the next ten hours. In the spirit of things, he let himself get dressed again. The human way, of course. One layer at a time. Underthings first, then stockings. A clean shirt with a high collar. A waistcoat. Trousers. He was alone, he was in his lodgings, there was no need for anything more… but he liked the thought of covering as much of himself as he could. Toes to throat, and then some. Almost like armor. He added a few more layers. Boots. Cravat—tied once, then redone tighter. Coat, and then a hat. Rude to wear one indoors, so maybe the thought counted for something. Gloves, one at a time. A barrier of leather between himself and anything he might touch. Sunglasses last. Railway style, with the side panels. The most covering style he had.

The glasses, more than anything, should have tipped him off about where his evening was headed.

He checked the clock after he was dressed again, convinced he must have eaten up at least a quarter hour. The clock told him it had only been three minutes.

Cleaning was his next attempt at a distraction, but cluttered as this house was, he’d kept it fastidiously tidy and ran out of dust to wipe away in discouragingly rapid time. The plants came next, and he made sure to give them all personalized attention and inspection, but they, too, were annoyingly well-kept. There wasn’t even anything to prune. Crowley even attempted to read something, but after he realized he’d reread the same page six times and hardly absorbed a word, he had to give it up as a bad job.

It didn’t help matters that, even with all the lamps on, he kept staring into the shadows like he was expecting to see something move inside one. The house was starting to feel more mazelike and claustrophobic by the moment, and it was only just midnight. He’d barely killed an hour.

The foggy streets weren’t much more welcoming than the inside of his townhouse, but he managed to talk himself into thinking a walk was a good idea. It might help him _clear his head,_ he thought. Or perhaps it had been something he’d said out loud. By the end of that hour, he discovered that he was muttering half of the things that crossed his mind under his breath.

A clear head was obviously something to strive towards.

Crowley took his walking stick with him when he went out. It was a silly thing, a momentary flight of fancy. He was a demon, and the only people he’d be concerned to meet out in the night would be _other demons._ What good would a human weapon do him then? Crowley knew a thing or two about fighting, but he was rusty as anything. The cane was about a century old, and the sword inside it nearly three—exactly as old as his last lesson in fencing.

He’d half-convinced himself that he’d had the rapier converted as a joke, and the snake-head handle seemed to give evidence to that theory. It had also been an exploration of his interest in human secrecy and intrigue, his minor fascination with hidden compartments. Of course, a large part of it had been nostalgia. Whatever his reasoning, though, he’d never shown Aziraphale what he’d done with the sword the angel once taught him how to hold. Hadn’t even let on that he’d kept the thing after dueling had fallen out of fashion and he lost his best excuse for causing mischief with it.

Regent’s Park was nearly deserted at this time of night and the few humans out in this kind of weather seemed uninterested in bothering the man pacing it from end to end like he was one sudden noise away from breaking into a sprint. Crowley should have _stayed_ in the park, but he soon wandered beyond it. He took turns at random, turning down streets and alleys without bothering to check the signage. He should have known his path was anything _but_ random, but he didn’t notice until it was too late.

His first clue was the shimmering in the air as he stepped across the perimeter. No mortal eyes could see it, but Crowley’s could. He blinked slowly, as if coming out of an episode of sleepwalking, and registered the familiar sight of the alleyway behind the bookshop. The bookshop itself, its back door, which his feet were _still_ leading him towards. Crowley checked his pocket watch and was dismayed to find that it was _not_ nine o’clock in the morning, or even close to it. He still had seven and a half hours to go.

Just five hours until dawn.

In the sixty-nine years that had passed since they’d begun their affair, Crowley couldn’t remember a single time he’d been the one to show up first like this. Turning up to Aziraphale’s home unannounced, between planned meetings. With the next one only a few hours away. This was an entirely unknown quantity, and he didn’t know how Aziraphale would react. Fuck, he didn’t even know if it was safe to be here.

When they met was largely dependent on when Crowley could get away to London, sure, but he always let the angel decide when a walk in the park or a visit to a teahouse would turn into a night at the shop. The closest thing to this—this random drop-in—had been when the bookshop was still brand new, just after Heaven tried to recall Aziraphale. It had been late at night and unannounced, but Crowley had done it just after they’d had a close run-in with Aziraphale’s supervisors. It was a justifiable bending of the rules. An extenuating circumstance. This was just presumptuous. Here he was, turning up on his l—his angel’s—on _Aziraphale’s_ doorstep in the middle of the night, a trembling wreck.

 _Never let him know,_ he thought, frantically. _Never let him know what it means._

This was one of the things he never talked about, one of the things he never explained. He didn’t _talk_ about Hell, didn’t _talk_ about how high the stakes really were. This is why he normally hid himself away until he was fine again.

Clutching the head of that stupid walking stick so hard it hurt his fingers, Crowley had to admit—at least to himself—that he wasn’t. He wasn’t fine right now. He wasn’t fine at all.

And in just a few seconds, Aziraphale would have to see him like this.

He knew— _knew_ —that this new panic was an irrational response. It was ridiculous, Crowley thought, to be afraid right now. Rationally, he knew that. Aziraphale was… well, he was Aziraphale, wasn’t he? Best one out of the bunch of them. Crowley had been shown, again and again, over the last nearly six thousand years that Aziraphale was his friend. Best friend. His closest—only—confidant. Someone who loved him enough to keep him around after all this time, even if it wasn’t the same kind of love Crowley felt in turn. They had built _trust_ together, fragile as it was. They held one another’s lives in their hands on a daily basis, they’d been—they’d been fucking for going on seven decades, now. He should be used to this, shouldn’t be waiting on the angel’s back step like he was waiting for a bolt from Heaven to smite him where he stood.

It wasn’t fear of physical danger, wasn’t the same fear that he felt in Hell. All he could think about was how he’d done this out of order, how this wasn’t how they _did_ things anymore, this kind of impulsive drop-in sort of thing. It might not be safe. It might not be _wanted._ The last thing he thought he could take right now was doing something unwanted.

Crowley couldn’t tell which potential outcome was even the thing he was dreading—the idea that Aziraphale might see him standing out here and ask him leave, to go back to that townhouse where the walls pressed in like a tourniquet… or the idea that Aziraphale might see him standing out here and _know._ That the angel would look at him and _tell_ how fragile he was right now. That he’d finally have irrefutable proof of the thing they’d been dancing around for centuries: that their friendship—their affair, the Arrangement itself—had consequences.

In that moment, it was like all the lessons he’d learned in their friendship were unreachable to him. The trust, the comfort, the familiarity… they were all hidden behind a fog. He felt reduced down to instinct, like a snake trying to decide if it should flee or strike or play dead. Run, or face the terror of being seen.

Oh, but it was too late to turn around and pretend he’d never been here. Too late by far. The perimeter he’d crossed had been one of Aziraphale’s alarm spells. He doubted the angel slept, but even if he had been sleeping tonight, that would have woken him. A light had been on already, visible through the bedroom window high up on the upper level of the shop. As Crowley watched, palms sweating inside his gloves, a second light was lit somewhere on the shop floor.

There was a tiny fragment of relief to be found here, though, and even through the fog his mind grabbed for it like a scrap of something precious fluttering in the breeze. He realized that, in all the time he’d been worrying about _this,_ he’d completely forgotten to be worried about the rest of it. Crowley could have laughed. A flash of variety to the grim monotony that was his life right now. A different flavor of fear.

Nothing for it, Crowley supposed. He turned his heart all the way off, felt it abruptly still its racing inside his ribcage with all the staggering inertia of a train collision, and prepared to make his excuses.

In the quiet left in the wake of his own heartbeat, all he could hear was the click of shoes approaching the shop’s plain, unmarked back door. He could _feel_ Aziraphale’s presence, just on the other side of it, like a warmth seeping out from beneath… and that made him realize something else. In spite of how difficult he knew it would be… he _wanted_ to see Aziraphale. In spite of the mess that he was in the moment, this was the only place he wanted to be tonight. It had _always_ been where he wanted to go. His feet had taken him here, even when his mind had been too scattered to let him think much of anything all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Context Spoiler:** Immediately prior to the start of this chapter, Crowley is tortured in Hell by other demons. His injuries are only really described while he’s in the process of healing them, and most are left vague—bruises, lacerations, a limp. The most explicit descriptions are of a dislocated shoulder that he pops back into place, and the realization that he had bitten his own tongue.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> I was going to do a really involved historical note about the emerging public sanitation efforts & pollution crises in Victorian London… but y’all. _Y’all._ This last week was easily two months long, and though I have been aware of every second of it as it has passed with agonizing slowness, I have also had very little luck at sitting down and writing during this time.  
> If you’re curious, look into the Great Stink of 1858 (a poop catastrophe that prompted the development of London’s sewer system) and the phenomenomenom of the oily, greenish-brownish-yellowish Pea Soup Fog (also sometimes called The London Particular, which got reverse engineered into a name for an actual real kind of soup with peas and ham).  
> In lieu of an actual historical note, I will instead leave you all with…
> 
>  **A Nature Fact I Learned Last Week That Has Haunted Me Ever Since:** We don’t actually know how eels fuck. They have never been observed fucking. We know that they have a weird metamorphic life cycle where they begin life as larvae and eventually shift into something else (where, presumably, the eel bebbies happen), but people haven’t yet found eel eggs. For an article about it that gets weirdly metaphysical about human life, death, and grieving for an article about eel sex, I present you with [this one](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-come-from) from The New Yorker. Like I said, this has been haunting me, especially given the other thing I write when I’m not writing this is [vaguely eel-like porn.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026520)  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> I have been really, really slow about replying to comments, y’all, but please know, I see all of them and they bring me great joy. Thank you so much.  
> And speaking of things I have seen in comments: Hi, Ashfae! I saw that you said that this chapter goes up the day before your birthday, and I wanted to wish you a very happy birthday. <3
> 
> Next chapter will hopefully be up **Thursday, January 21st**. I will attempt to put some WIP Wednesday previews up in the meantime, but I missed the last two due to personal/national crises. We’ll see how it goes.  
> Stay safe out there, y’all.


	19. Sharp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They used to have to find such complicated excuses to touch one another. Not like now, not since the Arrangement had grown large enough to contain their _affair._ For all its significance, it was still a lowercase word in Crowley’s imagination. Even after all these years. They hadn’t ever really named this thing, not with the finality that they had named their other agreement, so he never really knew what to call it. Never really knew what to call _them,_ or how to explain what they were to one another.
> 
> Nearly seventy years of this unnamed, precious thing… and in that moment, in this one wretched _night,_ Crowley found that he felt very much the same as he had all those centuries ago. Flat on his back and grasping for excuses. He’d forgotten all his ease with this, with the—with _his_ angel—forgotten everything he had learned. Forgotten how to reach out first, how to reach out at _all._ It wasn’t confusion or indecision. He knew what he wanted, what would feel better than what he had now, but he couldn’t remember how to _ask_ for what he needed. The words were stuck in his throat like glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, I should have known better when I estimated that the 1862 section would have only two chapters. It definitely is going to have three, and I have upped the chapter count to reflect that. As [Syl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylviaW1991/profile) recently pointed out with devastating accuracy, I have a pattern of writing two chapters of build-up and one chapter of smut. I should have expected this sldjf;sadf.
> 
> **Content Notes:** Honestly? Same stuff as last chapter. Post-torture aftermath, trauma, anxiety, insecurity, and panic. Light, canon-typical drinking. Piss-poor communication. Y’all know the drill.
> 
> Chapter specific sex acts: None.   
> All the sex happens next chapter, but they do talk about it a tiny bit at the end of this one.

The quiet scrape of metal on metal. The click of the tumblers as the lock disengaged. Crowley squeezed the serpent head of his walking stick so hard the leather of his gloves creaked, so hard the metal threatened to deform under his fingers. It was perhaps one of the longest seconds of his long, long life.

A thin strip of light appeared as the door was pushed open an inch or so.

“Hello?” Aziraphale’s voice asked, barely louder than a whisper.

“‘Lo,” Crowley repeated, then cleared his throat and tried again. “S’just me.”

Aziraphale pushed the door open wider still, the light from within spilling over the step like the first peek of dawn on a rainy morning. From what Crowley could see of him, the angel appeared to be dressed for comfort. Slippers, that old blue satin banyan Crowley had been known to steal on occasion. His pale curls were hidden beneath a soft sleep cap—a ridiculous affectation for one who had always claimed to be disinterested in sleep—but those fluffy sideburns he was wearing this century were still on full display.

“Crowley!” The angel breathed, and _fuck,_ it ought to be illegal for him to look at someone—to look at _Crowley_ like that. His whole face lit up with it, with such inexplicable joy that Crowley had to look down at Aziraphale’s slippered feet out of self-preservation.

“The very same,” he said, prying one of his hands free of the death grip he had on his cane so he could nudge the brim of his hat.

Thankfully, Aziraphale’s blinding, radiant delight faded into confusion. “It’s half one. We weren’t due until nine, I thought—unless…” There was a sharp intake of breath and Crowley made himself look up again. Aziraphale was wearing the slightest frown now, his mouth open in a perfect, comical _o._ “I didn’t miss it, did I? Did I leave you waiting?”

Crowley shook his head, harder than what probably was appropriate. “No, s’tomorrow. Or, uh. Today, I s’pose. Later.”

“Then what…” Aziraphale paused, his frown deepening. He looked over Crowley, eyes lingering over his body for an agonizing moment before sliding to look past him down the alleyway. “Crowley, has something happened?”

Through a concerted effort, Crowley successfully fought and triumphed over his own unruly corporation. The foolish thing couldn’t even seem to make up its mind, couldn’t decide if it wanted him to sprint away into the night or for him to rush forward and cling to Aziraphale like the drowning grab for driftwood. Crowley managed to do neither and instead simply stood in place like a normal person. A normal being. Like someone who wasn’t about to shatter into brittle, sharp pieces beneath his own skin.

“Social call,” He said, not answering the question. A beat passed, and then it occurred to him that he needed to ask some questions of his own. “F’you’re free, that is. I can wait for morning, if not. Know it’s a bit unorthodox, ah… This, I mean. Me. But if you wanted to, then—”

“Come in, then,” Aziraphale said, a wry smile on his lips. “It would be terribly uncharitable for me to leave someone out on my back step, especially in such _wretched_ weather.”

Crowley watched as the angel pushed the door open wider still, wide enough to let him inside, and for a moment he didn’t even register what was happening. He was being asked inside, just like that? It couldn’t be that easy. He’d been spoiling for a—well, not for a _fight._ But something inside him was coiled tense as a clockwork spring with the expectation that he’d have to explain this, to defend himself and this risky, stupid visit.

But… no. He was just told to come inside, and Aziraphale was staring at him, _waiting_ for him to do something besides give a stunning performance as some kind of cadaver who had been trained to stand upright.

“Right,” Crowley said, mostly to himself, and forced himself to move. One foot after another. Walking had never been his strong suit, and he couldn’t tell if having a walking stick to lean on was helping him or hindering him.

The wards parted for him as he crossed the threshold as they always did, the bookshop’s magic lingering on his shoulders like a friendly hand. They sealed behind him so tight that even the smell of the city and that oily, stinking fog couldn’t get through. Once they had closed, Crowley, at long last, let out the breath he’d been holding.

Still smiling, Aziraphale closed the door behind them, too. He held his hands out as Crowley passed, and dimly, Crowley registered that he was asking for something.

“That’s a very smart hat. I don’t think I’ve seen it before,” the angel commented, and Crowley caught up with what he was being prompted to do. He passed his top hat into Aziraphale’s hands, then retreated out of the back room and onto the shop floor.

“Got it a few weeks back,” he said over his shoulder. “Hadn’t worn it out yet.”

There were… different layers, he supposed, that it might be appropriate to shed right now. His coat, maybe. His gloves. If he took off his shoes it was as good as saying out loud that he planned to be here for a while. Crowley was struggling to remember the etiquette required for this kind of visit in this century in this country, and since he didn’t even know what kind of visit this even _was,_ he found it simpler to stay fully dressed. If Aziraphale thought it rude, well. Crowley supposed it should be expected for a demon to be rude.

On a logical level, Crowley knew that the shop was empty, that they were alone here. He knew that it was past midnight and there was no reason for any human to be here this late—Aziraphale always shooed all the humans out by about four in the afternoon, anyway. There was _definitely_ no reason for anything inhuman to be here, either, besides himself and the angel.

Rationally, Crowley knew that Aziraphale would never have invited him inside if there was anyone else here. However, he was having trouble reminding himself of _why_ he knew that. _Why_ he trusted that Aziraphale should care about his safety like he knew that the angel did. Self-preservation was part of it, sure. If Crowley were caught, Aziraphale would be caught, too… but there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?

Still, it couldn’t hurt to check.

All the curtains in the shop were drawn. The bolt on the front door, as he could see from across the room, was locked. The spaces between the bookshelves were shadowy, but empty. Even though he knew that, he still looked between each one as he walked the shop floor in a long, casual arc. Slowly, he was able to convince himself that there were no threats here. Slowly, he found himself relaxing, if only by a degree.

The inside of the shop was cluttered, dark, and dusty... but it didn't make him feel pinned in. The walls drew in close and tight, but in the way a heavy quilt weighs one down instead of like a snare. The darkness was comforting, familiar, and the dust was there not because this place was abandoned or unloved, but because the angel expected a bookshop that had been around for six decades ought to have a bit of dust to give it character. It wasn't some tomb. It wasn't a _grave._ Really, if it reminded him of any earthen, subterranean space at all, it would have to be the winter burrow of some sleeping creature. A restful place, warm and safe. If he could, Crowley would crawl up here in between the shelves and sleep here until the sun rose on a better day.

The shop was a place where time felt paused, a place where history flowed around the shop like it was a stone in a river. It wasn't a space that was _outside_ of time, though, a place that was unchanged by it entirely. Not at all like Hell, where one could wander out onto the banks of a vast, still-burning lake of sulfur—identically ancient as it had been at its creation—and feel as though no time at all had passed since the moment of the Fall.

No, it wasn't like Hell at all.

Just to be thorough, Crowley closed his eyelids and had a quick peek around the area with his infernal senses. Just to check. Just to be _sure._

He picked up on Aziraphale’s presence immediately. Massive, bright, hot like a star, so intense he almost pulled away on instinct, but he was glad he didn’t because then he got to _feel_ him, feel the way the edges of Aziraphale’s true nature sang against his consciousness like a finger trailing around the rim of a glass.

The only other living things anywhere in the shop were the eight spiders who had been permitted to make their webs in the corners of the ceilings. Aziraphale had explained their presence once by saying that he liked the way the silk looked in the light from the windows— _kooky bastard_ —and that he thought that the presence of a certain number of cobwebs gave the shop character… whatever that meant.

They’d lived far longer than any of their kin, not that Crowley planned on telling that to the angel any time soon. He assumed that when Aziraphale had let in those eight spiders some forty-ish years ago, he had done so without the knowledge that common house spiders were really only supposed to live for about a year, and so as a result the spiders had just never gotten around to dying. Crowley didn’t really mind them. He ignored, and was in turn ignored by, the shop’s resident arachnids. They were harmless. Spiders didn’t have lips as such to keep sealed, but they still kept mum about any goings on they might happen to observe from their webs.

Aziraphale’s human-like body was so small compared to the space he occupied in Crowley’s infernal senses that he actually managed to sneak up on him while Crowley was distracted checking on the spiders. He moved through his own aura so quietly on his slippered feet that Crowley flinched at the touch of the angel’s hand on his elbow.

“You seem like you could use a drink.”

Crowley looked over at Aziraphale, at the glass of amber liquid he held in his hands. The smile on his face couldn’t quite hide the curious furrow to his eyebrows that suggested he might be catching on to Crowley’s erratic behavior. That he might be about to ask for an explanation. Bugger that.

“Probably could, yeah,” Crowley said, keeping his voice even.

“What can I offer you?” Aziraphale took a sip of his drink. “I have taken the liberty of pouring myself some of the Talisker, but I can get you anything you’d like.”

The burn of good whisky would do him some good, Crowley supposed. Or even the burn of bad whisky, at this point, though it was encouraging to know that the angel had similar tastes to his own.

“Talisker’s fine. I’ll have the same.”

Aziraphale took him at his literal word. With a little bloody _wink,_ the angel pushed his own glass into Crowley’s hand and walked back to his office with a stride that invited Crowley to follow. Crowley stared after him, then down at his drink. There was a barely visible trace of Aziraphale’s lips on the rim, and if it weren’t for his gloves, Crowley imagined that he might have even be able to feel the lingering warmth from Aziraphale’s palm on the glass.

He looked up. Aziraphale was back in the office, seated at his desk and pouring himself a new drink. His body was angled towards the sofa like he expected Crowley to join him there. Crowley took a long drink, his lips touching where Aziraphale’s had just been. An indirect kiss, one he was sure Aziraphale had watched him take.

Crowley steered himself first towards the sofa, then changed course at the last moment and perched himself on the corner of the counter where Aziraphale had his till. The angel rotated in his seat to face him. He’d realized that sitting on the sofa would have cut off his line of sight to the rest of the shop, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet. Like this, he was still at something of a disadvantage, but the front door at least would still be in his peripheral vision.

“What have you been up to this week?” Crowley asked, hopefully heading off any of the angel’s potential questions before he could ask them. Questions like, _Dear boy, whyever did you turn up at my shop unannounced at one in the morning and then stalk around the ground floor as if anticipating an attack?_

The sound of Aziraphale’s voice was relaxing and the clear enjoyment in his tone put Crowley more and more at ease as he described his recent purchase of a new collection of Blake, and… and some other anecdotes, presumably. Crowley tried to pay attention, he really did, and he did make the right noises at all the right moments, but he found he couldn’t focus on Aziraphale’s _words_ to save his own life, no matter how badly he wanted to actually hear them. It was all just pleasant noise, droning and steady as it drowned out the static of his mind. Crowley might have been able to fall asleep to it, even standing upright like this, so he kept his hands busy—sipping his drink, playing with the head of his cane—in an effort to keep his mind alert.

Then, Aziraphale said his name and drew Crowley back into himself with jarring suddenness.

“Sorry, think I was somewhere else for a moment,” he said, smiling like a grimace. “What did you ask?”

“I said, _that is a very particular walking stick.”_ There was something like amusement in Aziraphale’s voice. “Is it new, too?”

“Nah,” Crowley said, finishing off the last of his whisky. The burn was strong, a welcome distraction. “S’an old thing. Been knocking about in a storage void for a few centuries. Found it a couple years back when I was looking for something else.”

“You always have had an affinity for serpent motifs,” the angel observed, smiling over the rim of his own glass. “Some would say you’re a rather predictable creature.”

_“Predictable?”_ Crowley repeated, clutching his empty drink to his chest in mock affront. “Shall we play _count the angels,_ then? _Predictable,_ bah. If we factored in all the wings and feathers you have on your things, too, we’ll be here all night.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes, still smiling. “Not that there’s terribly much of the night left…”

Crowley ignored him, this faux outrage giving him steam again, giving him a way into the conversation he’d been locked on the outside of by his own scattered mind. Giving him a through-line to grab onto, something that felt bloody familiar for once. He deposited his glass on the counter as he slid to his feet and set to prowling in the narrow space between the sofa and the door to the back room.

“I count one on your person at the moment—that’ll be your ring,” he said, pointing in Aziraphale’s general direction with the tip of his cane. “Two, normally, but you’re in your night things and so your watch is, presumably, upstairs.”

“Well, let’s see your watch, then,” Aziraphale countered, the soft squint of his eyes, the familiar wrinkles beside them putting a lie to the performative bitchiness of his tone. “I haven’t looked at yours recently, so I cannot say for certain if you have acquired a new one, but the last one you had was, as I recall, distinctly… ophidian, was it not? Why don’t you show me, and prove me wrong?”

As a matter of fact, Crowley _had_ gotten a new watch in the last few months since arriving in London again, and it did feature a different design than his last one. His new watch, as it happened, had _two_ snakes on the case—a 100% increase in the snake population over the previous design—and they were arranged in what could be described as a somewhat suggestive position, presuming the viewer didn’t know very much about how snakes actually fucked. It was all highly stylized, the pair of them shown face-to-face with their bodies twined together like a garland.

Aziraphale didn’t need to know about any of that, though, so Crowley kept his watch in his pocket.

“Your point?”

“If we are to be playing a game of aesthetics, my dear, I think it ought to be a fair one. If you’re counting my angels, wings, and feathers, I should be able to count your snakes, scales, and serpent-heads.”

As he spoke, Aziraphale stepped closer and closer, bastard grin upon his pink-cheeked face. Crowley side-stepped him and slipped back out on to the shop floor. He found himself momentarily relieved to be able to keep an eye on all that open space again. To not have to keep it at his back.

“When have you ever known me to play fair, angel? Nude angel baby,” he said, pointing at the statue of Cupid at the front of the shop. His eyes lingered on the door beyond it for a moment longer before he was able to drag them away to scan the rest of the room. “Those wing-handled scissors on your desk. Not one but _three_ lamps I can see just at the moment. That wretched soap dish in the back room that has that pair of cooing cherubs. Your chess pieces…”

Aziraphale followed him out. “You’re in my home, so of course you’re having an easier time with it. But you forget. I have a long memory, Crowley.”

“Do your worst.”

“Very well. Your stick, to start. The watch you had last year. The buttons on that frock coat you wore in ’22, those had the most _darling_ little serpents on them. The applique on that suit you wore in 1738. That ridiculous hatband you purchased in America, the one made out of _rattlesnake skin,_ of all things. That letter opener I sent you six years back…”

“You can’t count things that you gave me yourself, Aziraphale!” Crowley said, unable to fight his own grin any longer.

“Whyever not?” Aziraphale asked him, all innocence.

“Pretty sure that counts as encouraging my bad habits. It’s planting evidence, is what it is.”

“Alright, I will agree to those terms. But in turn, I must insist that you strike my chess pieces from your list of my own angelic paraphernalia for the same reason, as well as any future gifted items you might have considered adding.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“I’m still in the lead.” Crowley pointed at an additional angelic lamp he’d missed on his earlier count. “Angel-themed lamp number four.”

“In the lead for _now,_ perhaps. I’ve only had time to count things from the last century or so of your _unique_ sartorial choices, my dear. Please, allow me to get well and truly get started.”

While Crowley pretended to gape, Aziraphale began listing serpent after snake after ouroboros after serpent, each entry on the list accompanied by an approximate date or location of its use. It was strange and unsettling, though not unpleasant by any means, to hear proof straight from the angel’s mouth of how well (and how long) Aziraphale had been paying attention to what Crowley was doing. What he liked. Crowley was content to lose this game if it meant he got to keep listening.

… Until, of course, he caught Aziraphale in an error.

“You’ve counted that one twice, angel,” Crowley drawled, cutting Aziraphale off with a slow shake of his head. “No cheating. That won’t do, not from angels of the Lord.”

“What have I miscounted?” Aziraphale asked him. “I mentioned that brooch, your armbands, your sword—”

They had come to stand awfully close to one another in the course of this teasing little game, but in all the time they’d been together in the shop tonight, they had yet to touch each other. Not directly, at least. Not without a glass of whisky between them. That was another bit of teasing on Aziraphale’s part, too. Sometimes they liked to make a game of this, too, to see who would crack and reach for the other first. Crowley did want to touch tonight—no, more than that, he _needed_ some kind of contact… but he wasn’t going to be able to be the first one to cross that line. Wasn’t able to push. Wasn’t even able to relax his tense, white-knuckled grip on his cane.

So, he did the next best thing. In the narrow space between their two bodies, Crowley began to draw his sword from where it was hidden inside his walking stick—only an inch or so, only enough to explain what he had implied. He watched Aziraphale take a tiny half-step backwards to get a better look, watched the angel’s eyes widen as he saw that glint of steel in the low light of the bookshop.

“You… you kept it?” Aziraphale asked him quietly. “Is this the same one?”

“It is, yeah,” Crowley answered. “Thought I’d hang onto it.”

Memories of one hot summer night almost three hundred years back floated to the surface of his mind. Aziraphale’s voice had been so steady and sure as he explained footwork and how to spot a weak point in an opponent’s guard. The angel had moved like a dancer. He remembered the weight of Aziraphale’s body pressing down on him as Crowley lay disarmed on his back in the dirt.

They used to have to find such complicated excuses to touch one another. Not like now, not since the Arrangement had grown large enough to contain their _affair._ For all its significance, it was still a lowercase word in Crowley’s imagination. Even after all these years. They hadn’t ever really named this thing, not with the finality that they had named their other agreement, so he never really knew what to call it. Never really knew what to call _them,_ or how to explain what they were to one another.

Nearly seventy years of this unnamed, precious thing… and in that moment, in this one wretched _night,_ Crowley found that he felt very much the same as he had all those centuries ago. Flat on his back and grasping for excuses. He’d forgotten all his ease with this, with the—with _his_ angel—forgotten everything he had learned. Forgotten how to reach out first, how to reach out at _all._ It wasn’t confusion or indecision. He knew what he wanted, what would feel better than what he had now, but he couldn’t remember how to _ask_ for what he needed. The words were stuck in his throat like glass.

“I think it counts for half points,” Aziraphale mused, pulling Crowley out of his anxious spiraling.

“Half?” He repeated, lost.

“Yes, half. The blade is the same, but you’ve replaced the hilt, and that was the part I was trying to count, anyway. Before, you’d had a serpent’s body coiled around your grip like… so…” Aziraphale leaned even further into Crowley’s space, trailed his fingers in a curving gesture over the back of Crowley’s gloved hand, so close that he could feel the heat of them through the leather. Still not touching, no. Not yet.

“I’ll allow you half points, sure,” Crowley said, standing so still his muscles almost hurt with it. He wished more than anything that he just knew what to _do—_

“I wonder,” Aziraphale teased, leaning back away, “If you recall what I taught you about how to hold your sword.”

Crowley shifted his feet, settled into a fencer’s stance, and drew his blade. He remembered what this felt like—not from practice, no, he’d never had much cause to use this on his own. His corporation remembered it better than his mind could, which was good, given how busy his mind was. He’d finally found his excuse.

“What do you think? Do I pass inspection?” He asked, narrowly resisting the urge to give the sword a flourish. _Asking_ might be beyond him now, but _goading_ was something he might be able to manage. His odds of teasing the angel into a scuffle and finally, _finally_ getting to touch him would be better, Crowley thought, if he didn’t drop his sword as soon as he got it out.

There was a strange look on Aziraphale’s face as he watched Crowley. “I don’t like this new hilt as much. There’s no guard to protect the hand, and the balance isn’t right.” The way he said it made it seem like he’d said far more than he actually had, though for the life of him, Crowley couldn’t decipher the rest of his meaning.

“Well, let’s test it, shall we?” Crowley asked, his voice too loud in the quiet shop. He couldn’t figure out how to correct his volume, though. Rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, all restless energy and reckless bravado, he kept talking. “Bet you have one of your own tucked away somewhere in the shop. Or something that’s long and sword-y, at least…”

“I don’t,” Aziraphale said, a fraction too quickly.

“Can use the rest of the walking stick, then, if you like. The, er, sheath, I suppose it’s called…”

“Crowley…”

“It’s wood, yeah, but it’s sturdier than it looks. And I know you know how to blunt a sword.”

“Actually, I rather think…”

“C’mon,” he said, giving a tiny lunge forward—nothing of a threat in it, just an invitation for play. “Don’t you want to thwart me? Just once, for old times?”

“Crowley.” Aziraphale said his name again, more firmly this time.

He froze. “Yes?”

“Don’t, please.” The angel’s voice was softer now, almost fragile. “I don’t want this.”

Crowley slipped the sword back inside the body of the cane and set it aside, his heart plummeting. He wanted to go, to apologize and then leave. Well, not quite. What he desperately, _desperately_ wanted was to stay, but he dreaded being asked to leave. He was on the cusp of making his excuses and slipping out, hopefully before Aziraphale got the chance to shoo him away, and then the angel touched him. Aziraphale stepped closer, closed the gap between them, settled a warm palm against Crowley’s cheek, and _touched him._ Crowley could have broken in half right there, just from that one tiny gesture, but he held himself together through an act of willpower alone.

“What’s wrong, Crowley?” Aziraphale asked him, his brows knitting together and, _oh._ Oh no. He was doing that thing again, that thing where he looked like he was staring right through you. Crowley couldn’t move under the power of a look like that. “You’re acting so strange tonight.”

“M’fine,” Crowley said, and it was a lie. It was a _damn_ lie, but what else could he say?

Even in his terror, Crowley knew that if their roles were reversed, if instead it was Aziraphale who was the one hiding half-healed bruises behind a glamour… Crowley would leave. He’d keep his distance. If he couldn’t help Aziraphale, couldn’t protect him—and there was no helping someone owned by Hell—then he would try to reduce the risk of him getting hurt. That would be the only risk that wouldn’t be worth taking for this, the only reason he’d willingly give up time with his best friend.

Aziraphale, he knew, would do the same if he ever found out. And Crowley knew just as surely that he never wanted to give him that chance. The risk that their companionship brought was less than the agony of not having it. Having Aziraphale with him made the rest of it survivable. No, he’d never let Aziraphale see him in the aftermath before, but he knew that if he hadn’t had the angel in his life all this time—even at a distance, sometimes—he would have had a much harder time staying himself. Hell would have worn him down into one of its own long ago.

He hated lying to Aziraphale. It always made him feel like he was living up to all the bad expectations everyone had for him. Made him feel like the angel’s trust was misplaced. Crowley _liked_ that Aziraphale could trust him, but there were things they couldn’t ever talk about, things he couldn’t ever let him know.

_Never let him know what it means, never let him know what the stakes really are._

Well, maybe what he’d said wasn’t _quite_ a lie. Sure, Crowley was definitely far from _fine_ right now… but he would be fine again later, wouldn’t he? He was always fine eventually, and being here for these next few hours would probably speed up the process some. So, maybe this was less of a lie and more of a… promise.

Crowley said it again, steadier this time. “I’m fine. Just, ah…” He wiggled his fingers as he cast about, looking for another string of words to explain this. Looking for something else that wasn’t technically a lie. “Got a bit of pent-up energy, I think. Having trouble staying still.”

“What would you like to do about that?” Aziraphale asked him, gentle and smiling. His tone was purposefully light and even, carefully open-ended. It was a question designed not to push Crowley in any one direction, to offer him every option in the world—except, it seemed, for swordplay.

It presented him with far too many options and Crowley found himself struggling to say even a single word in answer. Fortunately, Aziraphale had extensive practice at dealing with Crowley when he got like this, all weird and useless. The angel knew how to make sense of him in these moments when no one else, not even Crowley himself, could.

Aziraphale held out a hand. “Would you like to dance?”

“Dance?” Crowley repeated, feeling like he must have missed a step somewhere. The angel’s other hand stayed right where it was, the thumb rubbing along his cheekbone in slow, shallow arcs.

“I thought it might help with your restlessness,” Aziraphale explained. “It’s tactile and mobile. Very similar to, ah, to fencing, in some regards… but with what I hope is a greatly reduced chance of you injuring yourself.”

He cracked a grin and took the hand Aziraphale was offering. “It’s like you’ve forgotten how bad of a dancer I really am.”

“Nonsense,” Aziraphale said, finally moving his hand from Crowley’s cheek to settle it in at his waist.

Crowley kicked his cane out of the way, nudged it up against one of the columns so he would be able to find it again later in the clutter on his way out—he couldn’t leave behind evidence that he’d been here, after all.

His gloves, he noticed, were starting to frustrate him. They’d originally felt like a protective barrier, but now they were more like a constraint. The hand Aziraphale was holding was starting to sweat, and he felt ridiculous for putting a layer of leather between his palm’s and the angel’s. He’d just moved to tug one of them off when Aziraphale caught Crowley’s hand in between his own and stopped him.

“Is the serpent trying to shed his skin?” The angel asked him, pinching Crowley’s gloved fingertip between a finger and his thumb.

“He might be, yeah,” Crowley said, curious if this was still a part of their earlier game, or if this was something else.

“Let us see, then, what he’s hiding under there.”

Crowley nodded and watched, strangely dry-mouthed, as Aziraphale gently, sensually pulled the glove from his hand. When he was done, the angel pressed a kiss to each one of Crowley’s knuckles and settled his hand onto his own shoulder. Aziraphale tucked the glove away in Crowley’s inside coat pocket, the back of his hand warm through the fabric of Crowley’s shirt.

“I don’t know that many dances,” Aziraphale said as he started up on Crowley’s other hand. “As you well know, of course.”

“It’s not like I’m an expert dancer, either.”

“I’ve had a… well, it’s only just a fragment of a tune, really. But I have had this song in my head this past week…” The angel wasn’t looking at him, focusing all his attention on the glove. “I don’t remember all of it, but it seems, ah. It seems like it would be nice to dance to.”

“Do you remember the name?” Crowley asked him, feeling a tiny ache in his ribs as Aziraphale kissed each of his fingers and then the very center of his palm. He knew that the ache had nothing to do with the bruising.

Aziraphale shook his head. “I don’t even remember who composed it. I heard it in a concert, I think, but only once. And that was decades ago by now.” He tucked the second glove away and patted Crowley’s chest over the pocket.

“Was I with you?”

The angel settled them back into position with a hand on Crowley’s waist. Their other hands were clasped together, skin-to-skin at long last.

“You were not,” Aziraphale said, a faint smile on his face. He swayed in place, eyes closed, as he tried to find the rhythm. Crowley wondered if that had been the full story, but then Aziraphale spoke again, this time in a whisper. “But I wish you had been.”

Crowley’s throat felt a bit tight. He didn’t want the angel to regret saying that, so he offered him an out. “Bet it would be easier to remember the rest of the song if I’d been there. One of us would probably know it.”

“Probably so,” Aziraphale conceded. He didn’t open his eyes, but Crowley watched as his cheeks became just a shade pinker. The angel cleared his throat. “Forgive me if this is hard to follow.”

Aziraphale began to hum, low and quiet in his throat. It sounded familiar somehow, but Crowley couldn’t place it, at least not from the portion of it the angel remembered. It was a waltz, that much he knew, and whatever it was, it was bouncy and bright and had Aziraphale’s chin bobbing adorably against his chest as he swayed.

When he was content that he’d found the beat, Aziraphale led Crowley along in a dance as spiraling as the tune itself, right around the edges of the rug that hid Heaven’s sigil from prying mortal eyes. The steps were inexpert, obviously mostly guesswork on Aziraphale’s part. Crowley found that he didn’t mind it in the slightest. He let himself be led around and around and around, following the melody and the steps as best he could.

It took him a few rotations, but he was soon able to hum along with the angel. Aziraphale’s smile when he heard him was self-conscious but giddy, and he tipped his head forward onto Crowley’s shoulder, tucking his face up against his neck and out of sight. Crowley felt his own humming vibrating against Aziraphale’s cheek as they found their harmony.

Though Aziraphale’s eyes were closed, Crowley kept his open. He couldn’t help himself. He watched the shadows over Aziraphale’s shoulder, his gaze sliding from door to window, from bookshelf to bookshelf. Nothing ever _changed,_ nothing was ever _there._ Even the spiders were sleeping. Bit by bit, Crowley felt himself thawing.

His heart was still turned off as Crowley didn’t trust himself that much, at least not yet, but he thought that if it were beating, this would have soothed it. There was something so wonderfully grounding about being held like this. The places on his corporation where Aziraphale was touching him—hand, waist, hand, the weight of the angel’s head on his shoulder, the feel of his breath on Crowley’s cheek—were the parts of his body that felt the most real. The parts that felt most like they belonged to him. The more they touched, the faster they moved, the more Crowley felt like himself again.

He didn’t want this to stop, didn’t want to go back to sitting still, to keeping his distance. He wanted to keep touching, to keep being held. He wanted more of this, as much of it as he could get. _More._ The idea of curling up under the quilts in Aziraphale’s narrow bed tugged against Crowley’s imagination, impossible to ignore, he just… didn’t quite know how to get there.

When he felt Aziraphale start to slow them down, Crowley acted on impulse and pulled the angel in tight against him. Wrapped him up in his arms.

Kissed him.

When they broke apart, Aziraphale was flushed anew and breathing hard. He leaned forward again, put his mouth to the high collar of Crowley’s shirt. Crowley found himself doubly glad for that when Aziraphale next spoke because it meant that Crowley didn’t have to look the angel in the face when he answered him with another lie.

“So,” Aziraphale said, clearly amused and still a bit breathless, “why did you _really_ turn up at my back door tonight?”

“I was up late,” Crowley told him, as if by rote. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Up late and restless and full of pent-up energy…” he mused. “Whatever could have gotten you in such a state, I wonder?”

Crowley stalled out.

“I think you might have been excited for tomorrow,” Aziraphale continued, as if he hadn’t noticed the pause. There was an unmistakably flirtatious lilt to the end of his suggestion, and Crowley grasped at that like it was the last thing preventing him from falling off a precipice. He was desperate to find some thread of this conversation that felt familiar and was unwilling to let it slip through his fingers once he got ahold of it.

“Yes!” He said it a little too loudly, the first time, then tried again. “Yes, that’s. That’s what it was. Terribly impatient today, I think.”

“Whatever am I to do,” Aziraphale murmured, nipping gently at the skin just above Crowley’s collar with each word, “with such an impatient, eager creature?”

Crowley leaned into the touch like a plant towards the sun, his tongue useless in his mouth. It wasn’t a question of _what_ he wanted—if sex was an option, as he was realizing it might be, it sounded like an excellent solution to his current predicament. Touch, distraction, and probably at least one knee-shaking orgasm? A ready-made excuse to stay twisted up in the angel’s lap for maybe _hours_ after? It sounded perfect, sounded exactly like what he needed.

“You can ask, you know,” Aziraphale told him, the smile clear in his voice as he pressed his lips to the shell of Crowley’s ear.

“Ask?”

“If there’s something you want, something you _need,”_ he continued, kissing Crowley’s neck, “you should ask. We may have the very same need.”

“I think…” Crowley said, swallowing around the enormity of his hunger for this… but not _just_ for this. Not just for sex. What he wanted, more than anything, was for things to feel like they were fine again. He hoped that this might be a way to get there. “I think I want you to fuck me.”

There wasn’t even a beat spent waiting, wasn’t any space at all for him to worry or to doubt. Aziraphale answered him immediately with a searing kiss, and he could _feel_ the angel’s smile through it.

“I thought you’d never ask. Can you wait, dearheart, until we’re upstairs, or should I have you right here on the floor?”

Crowley considered it, considered banishing his clothes and rushing ahead to the sweaty physicality of it, to finally be able to put this tired and achy body to some use that would feel like what he wanted from it, to put this fucking wretched day behind him and do something _he_ wanted.

Then, like a mirror of Aziraphale’s nervous habits, his eyes flicked upwards to the skylight and the foggy darkness above. He’d be staring at that all night, he knew, and at the front door. At the back door. Into the shadows between the shelves.

“Upstairs,” he answered. “I think I’d like to be in a bed.”

In _Aziraphale’s_ bed, specifically. In his bedroom, that sanctuary within a sanctuary. As hidden as he could be, and alone with the only being he wanted to see right now. The only being he could tolerate seeing _him._

“Of course, darling,” Aziraphale said. “Anything you want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter with no historical note? What is this, the Twilight Zone??? The only thing I can think of is to link y’all the song Aziraphale was humming:  
> [Exotische Pflanzen (Exotic Plants) / Op. 109,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LymxwyyWpME) a waltz written by Johan Strauss I in 1839.  
> That said, linking that _here_ instead of, say, two chapters from now is really just me robbing a part of a historical note from a future chapter to try to make one here. So, I guess… it’s fun fact time.
> 
> **Fun Fact:** Sword canes are 100% legal where I live (as well as all swords/big knives in general now for open carrying purposes, thanks to a 2017 law—yeehaw). When I was 16, I was volunteering/collecting donations for charity in a grocery store parking lot and struck up a conversation with an elderly man wearing a fox tail hanging from his belt. He also had a fox-head walking stick, and it was sick as Hell, so I complimented it… at which point he drew his sword (again, in a grocery store parking lot) and shouted, “Thanks! It’s a sword.” Which is a statement feels like the mysterious stranger version of “Thanks! It has pockets!” Note that this was pre-2017 and swords were definitely still illegal for everyday brandishing, but Fox Guy did not care. He also told me the end of the world was coming, and then its rebirth. Way back then when I was 16, I thought he was being overly dramatic, but here in 2021 I’m starting to reevaluate his perspective. #FoxGuyWasRight #ThanksItsASword
> 
> Writing has been slow as fuck lately, but I’m relieved to have been able to get this one out in time and didn’t have to delay. The last chapter in the 1862 section is due for publication **Thursday, February 4th**. We’re in the home stretch, now, folks. Stay funky, y’all. See you in two weeks (or sooner, hopefully, if I get back in gear responding to comments).


	20. Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Can I... please. Can I take them off?” Crowley asked the question before he could stop himself. Before he could swallow it down. He spoke quickly, feeling himself shaking just enough that he feared Aziraphale would feel it, too. “Just for a moment, then I'll put them back on.”
> 
> He watched Aziraphale’s gaze track over his body, naked and bare from toe to tip, except…
> 
> _Except…_
> 
> “Your glasses?” Aziraphale said it quietly, tentatively. The angel’s eyes were huge, shiny in the firelight, a barely-there frown pinching his forehead. He looked as if he scarcely believed the words coming out of his own mouth, as if he were afraid of them, or perhaps what they could do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _*looks at that expanded chapter count*_  
>  _*looks at all the past author notes saying this fic was nearing the end*_  
>  _*shrugs*_  
>  Hi, guys. The 1862 section grew an extra ~~limb~~ conversation, so it’s going to be 4 chapters long instead of 3 like I’d planned. If you’re looking to wait to read until the “Torture Aftermath” stuff is past, it’s not quite over yet… but there _is_ comfort in this chapter and the next, I promise.  
> Unless I make a liar out of myself again, the fic as a whole should end on chapter 23, and it will end on a hopeful note.
> 
> As a reminder: you ever want additional context before something before reading that I haven’t listed here, you’re always welcome to ask me in a comment, on tumblr, or on discord.
> 
> **Content Notes:** The usual trauma responses like anxiety and hyper-vigilance (some of which happens during sex), plus a little bit of mild/brief disassociation (not during the sex).  
> Extremely frank and pragmatic (to the point of being blunt) decision-making about what Effort to make.  
> Another really graphic and sexualized description of Making an Effort.  
> Speaking of! The sex in this section is loving and consensual, but it is not completely… healthy. There are communication issues and Crowley’s not in a great frame of mind (and also a little physically injured, still), but everyone has fun. More detail in the end notes as a context spoiler, should you decide you need more info before reading.
> 
> Let’s talk about that sex a bit more. In this chapter, you can expect: hand jobs, angelically assisted genital transformations, vaginal fingering, and oral sex. Aziraphale has a penis this time. Crowley starts the scene off with no genitals at all, but will get himself a bespoke vulva lovingly crafted for him before too long.

The process of going upstairs happened faster than usual, somehow. Neither of them miracled it—at least, Crowley didn’t _think_ either of them miracled it. It was possible it only felt faster because Crowley lost track of a few seconds of time, almost like he’d given in to the rare urge to blink and then the world had moved on past him while his eyes had been closed. It was also possible that it went faster because, of the two of them, Aziraphale was much better at walking and had offered to take that responsibility on for the both of them.

Somehow, Crowley had ended up with his long, spindly legs wrapped around the angel’s plush waist and his arms around his neck, and Aziraphale was content to carry him up to the bedroom like that. While snogging him silly, of course. It was a lot to do all at once, all that walking and carrying and snogging, and all while going up a spiral staircase, too. Crowley found himself grateful for it. Scattered as he was, he knew he wouldn’t have been able to handle even just the simultaneous walking and snogging without tripping and sending them both hurtling down the stairs to their inconvenient discorporations.

So, it was no wonder he was distracted. He was somewhere he could afford to drop his guard for a moment, anyway, somewhere that it was safe to not be hyper-aware of every movement and sound for just a few quiet seconds. Ideally, he was about to get even _more_ distracted, assuming the angel was still interested. Crowley couldn’t fucking wait. The idea of getting to turn his bloody brain off for a bit was deeply appealing.

The next thing he was really aware of was that his back was against a door— _the_ door, the bedroom door—and Aziraphale was still snogging him, even while fumbling for the lock. His heart, treacherous thing that it was, had started beating once more. Hammering, really. When had Crowley told it that it could turn itself back on? Never, that’s when. Sneaky thing had waited for him to be distracted to kick back on again, all on its own. Crowley knew there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. He was fully supported, after all. Perfectly balanced against the door in a pair of strong arms. There wasn’t any worry about him being dropped. He was snug. Held tight. _Pinned._

_… Ah._

“M’edow’,” Crowley asked, muffled and slurred, against Aziraphale’s lips as he patted vaguely in the vicinity of the angel’s collar.

“I’m sorry?” Aziraphale asked him in turn, leaning back enough to look him in the face.

It was all the space Crowley needed to disentangle his legs from around the angel’s waist and put his feet, shaky as they were, back down on the ground again. That alone was a big improvement, but he still felt flighty, so he ducked under the angel’s arms and slipped around the side of him.

“Just wanted to get down. Stand up,” he explained when he noticed Aziraphale staring after him. It felt better, less like he was trapped in a corner, but now he had made himself a new problem: Aziraphale was no longer touching him. “C’mere,” he added, holding his arms out again. “Wasn’t done kissing you yet.”

Aziraphale chuckled and stepped into Crowley’s embrace, kissing him up and down the length of his throat while his fingers made quick work of his cravat and the buttons of his shirt and waistcoat. Crowley tried to return the favor, and thankfully the angel was practically indecent already in his night things, because undoing anything more complicated than the knot tying his banyan shut would have been beyond the skill of Crowley’s suddenly clumsy fingers.

Crowley prepared for more layers, perhaps trousers whose falls he’d need to work open, but as the satin banyan slid down the angel’s shoulders to pool on the floor at his feet, he saw that all Aziraphale was wearing under the robe was a thin linen nightshirt. It went down past his knees, but with the light of the fire behind him, Crowley could see the shadow of the angel’s body through the pale fabric. He was also very clearly not wearing anything under it. Crowley raised his eyebrows at that, and the brazen thing just bit his lip and grinned.

“You have a head start on me,” Crowley said, looking down at the way his own shirt and waistcoat hung open over his chest. For fuck’s sake, he was still wearing his coat, and everything from the waist down, shoes included, was still fully fastened. “I’m shocked, angel, that you answered the door practically in the nude. What if I’d been a customer?”

The angel huffed out a laugh. “I knew it was you.”

“You did?”

“I did. I had a bit of advance warning, and I looked to see who it was. Ethereally looked, of course.” Aziraphale wiggled his fingers to illustrate his point, and then his hands resumed their quest, tugging Crowley’s shirt out of his trousers and off his shoulders. The coat and waistcoat went with it, and all of it ended up bundled in the angel’s arms with his cravat. “And I saw it was you. You stepped through one of the shop’s alarm spells—very, ah, alarming, actually, which I suppose is the point, but you’ll forgive me if I _was_ a bit indisposed…”

“Indisposed?” Crowley repeated, as Aziraphale passed his clothing behind them to set it on the lid of the trunk at the foot of the bed.

“Ah, well…”

There was just the faintest trace of pink at the tips of Aziraphale’s ears as he spoke, and their bodies pressed close enough together as he leaned down that Crowley could feel the angel’s Effort, half-hard, press against his hip. Just like that, Crowley felt himself find a bit steadier footing, so to speak. He’d had nearly seventy years of practice bringing the angel pleasure. His body would know what to do now, how to make him do the right things, _say_ the right things, even if his brain was still half-static. This felt like finally being handed a script after spending all night having to make it up as he went along.

He opened his mouth, heard himself talking. It all sounded normal, like listening to a recording of the last time they did this. A time when he hadn’t been such a mess.

“Your state of undress gives a demon certain… ideas about what you might have been doing up here all alone,” he purred against the shell of the angel’s ear. His hands roamed over Aziraphale’s hips, his thighs, until they found his cock. Aziraphale groaned, hips pushing forward into Crowley’s palm. He gripped him loosely, stroking lightly through the fabric. “Are you feeling a bit pent up and restless, too, angel? Let me help. I know what you like.”

He had the angel in his arms, in his hand—fully hard from Crowley’s teasing, now, and tenting the fabric—and it was all going well. Aziraphale was in good spirits, the faintest trace of a laugh underneath his eager little pants and gasps as Crowley as he loosened the tie at the collar of his nightshirt to kiss his neck and lick at his collarbone. As he dropped his free hand lower to tug up the hem of his nightshirt, eager to get up under it, eager to finally get his hands on the angel’s skin. Aziraphale seemed excited to get on with things, too, his warm fingers tracing the planes of Crowley’s bare chest, his waist, his shoulders and his stomach, before tugging open his trouser fastenings with practiced ease.

“Crowley…?” Aziraphale said, a note of confusion in his voice as his hands stilled against Crowley’s hips.

“Mmm?” Crowley asked, face still tucked against the side of the angel’s neck. Nose and tongue still drinking in the familiar scent of his skin.

“Please don’t take this as a complaint,” the angel continued, and Crowley felt himself tense. “But you don’t have any genitals.”

Crowley looked down at his own corporation, trousers pushed down to mid-thigh, and sure enough, the only thing between his legs was smooth, featureless skin. All he could say in response was, “Oh.”

He’d… forgotten. All that time earlier in front of the mirror, making himself look at his injuries, and he’d forgotten that he was blank as the day he’d been Created. Forgotten, or maybe even not noticed. It was strange. He’d made the choice to get rid of his Effort only this morning, and yet it felt like something that had happened months ago. It felt like the action of a stranger.

The reasoning behind it was something he remembered, at least, but he remembered it like it was something he’d heard someone else’s mouth say instead of his own. Crowley was currently Effortless for the same precautionary reason that he tied his hair back whenever he was wearing it long and needed to go Downstairs: the fewer dangly bits he had that someone could grab onto in a scuffle, the better.

Sometimes he considered foregoing limbs entirely on those visits and instead embracing the aerodynamic, slippery anatomy of a serpent, but there were tradeoffs. For one, no hands. As an extension of that, no claws. For another, he already always felt at his lowest whenever he was in Hell as it was, and he didn’t want to exacerbate that feeling by literally crawling on his belly betwixt all his coworkers’ feet. Mostly, though, it was because the floors were _filthy._

“Did you want to make an Effort?” Aziraphale asked him, not ungently. It was still startling, the sound of his voice pulling Crowley back to the present moment.

“Suppose I should, yeah,” he said, running a hand through his hair.

“What would you like?”

And wasn’t that just the question? When Crowley tried to think about what he wanted, he found himself unable to come up with an answer—a feeling that wasn’t as common these days as it used to be, but one he remembered well from the early days of their affair. This time, though, it wasn’t so much that he was frozen by choice as it was that he realized he was deeply, profoundly ambivalent about his options. He wanted to fuck and feel good and, at the end of it, to come. Wanted to turn his bloody brain off for a second. To feel grounded in his body and do something that felt normal with it. He just… didn’t particularly care what parts he had when that happened.

“I want…” Crowley began, then swallowed around nothing. Around all the non-words that began bubbling up in his throat. Aziraphale waited patiently for him, like he always did when Crowley’s tongue ran away from him.

_I want you to hold me,_ he thought. _I don’t want a single part of me not being touched by some part of you._

But he didn’t want to be held down. Not even by Aziraphale, as much as he usually liked the way that felt. But he couldn’t do that, not today. Not without feeling like he was about to crawl out of his skin. And he wanted to be able to see the door.

“I want your hands on me,” Crowley finally said, amazed at how normal he sounded. “I want you to fuck me. Arse, or mouth, or cunt. I don’t care. But I’d like to be on top, whatever it is.”

Aziraphale’s eyebrows raised. “Alright. I can do that. I happen to have a cock today… How would you feel about riding me?”

“Sounds bloody brilliant,” Crowley said, kissing the angel right on his beautiful mouth and dragging his trousers all the rest of the way down. They got tangled around his boots when he tried to kick them off, and Aziraphale caught him by the elbows before he fell. It only hurt a little bit, being grabbed like that somewhere the bruises weren’t entirely healed, and he was able to laugh it off at the sight of Aziraphale’s easy, indulgent smile.

“Let me,” Aziraphale murmured, gently steering Crowley towards the edge of the bed so he could sit down. Crowley angled himself so the door was in the periphery of his vision, but made himself keep his eyes on the angel in front of him.

Aziraphale sank to his knees and worked Crowley’s boots and stockings off his feet, occasionally sneaking a look up at him from between his legs with a cheeky little smile on his face. If Crowley had genitals, they’d be very interested right now. And Crowley himself _was_ interested, Effortless and distractable though he was at the moment. He tousled Aziraphale’s hair, the angel’s scalp warm against his palm.

“You’re pretty,” he mumbled, quirking something like a smile of his own. Then, “Think I’d like to make a cunt tonight. Sound good?”

His decision was impulsive and based totally on pragmatism. He didn’t want to do any more miracles on himself today than he absolutely had to, not after all the time and effort he’d spent soothing bruises and knitting muscle back together. His corporation was sore and already felt like a sponge soaked with infernal power, and he didn’t want to add to that if he could avoid it. Making a cunt and letting Aziraphale fuck it would take one miracle. Making a cock and miracling his arsehole slick and relaxed would take two. Normally he loved being slowly opened up on Aziraphale’s fingers, but not tonight. Tonight, he wanted to rush straight ahead to the part where he had the angel’s cock up him somewhere and was feeling good enough to ignore all the ways that he wasn’t. He was almost proud of himself for figuring out such a simple path to his answer.

“Sounds good,” Aziraphale answered, pressing a kiss to the inside of Crowley’s knee. “Actually… I did have an idea I wanted to ask you about.”

Well, that sounded promising.

“Yeah?”

“Do you… remember Paris?” The angel began, suddenly looking a bit shy. Crowley would have guessed the odds were fifty-fifty that it was an act. A bit of flirtation.

“How could I forget Paris?” he answered, mind filling with a number of pleasant images from that night as he tried to guess the connection. The less pleasant images were resolutely ignored.

Aziraphale’s hand trailed up Crowley’s leg, over the bunched-up trousers he was still wearing and onto the bare skin of his thigh. Higher, even, to the crease beside his still-blank pelvis.

_Ah._

“I remember you sculpted me a beautiful quim that night,” Aziraphale continued, his voice low and just the slightest bit rough. “And I wondered—that night, even—if I might someday show you what that felt like.”

Although he’d already realized that he didn’t want to pump any more demonic miracles into his corporation, Crowley hadn’t mentally prepared himself for the idea that someone _else’s_ miracles might touch it, instead. Might change his shape, even. He didn’t know quite what to do with that, and was vaguely aware that he was bouncing his leg.

It felt like his corporation was experiencing _nerves,_ which was ridiculous. He had absolutely no reason to feel _nervous,_ not here. Not in Aziraphale’s bed, the angel himself between Crowley’s legs. The angel who had never once hurt him, not even when he should. The angel who always cared about what made Crowley feel good, who always wanted to give Crowley what he wanted and nothing that he didn’t. This was the safest place in London—no, the safest place on Earth. Anywhere, really. So why was he reacting like this?

“What does it feel like?” Crowley heard himself asking.

Aziraphale shifted on his knees, his fingers gently scratching at Crowley’s wiry tangle of pubic hair. “Wonderful,” he said, storm-grey eyes wide and earnest. “But strange. Or rather, unfamiliar. Your magic felt different than my own. I remember it feeling very warm and very tingly. Intense, but in a good way.”

Each new part of the description affected him more than the last, the words dripping down his spine like hot wax, shocking and sensuous. What the angel was describing sounded overwhelming in a way that was deeply appealing to him right now. Crowley wanted to feel warm. He wanted to feel something intense. He wanted to know what Aziraphale’s magic felt like when it sank under his skin, especially if it felt different than his own magic.

_Champagne bubbles,_ Crowley thought vaguely, repeating the words like the chorus of a song he only half-remembered. _He told me it felt like champagne bubbles when I healed the bruises on his wrists._

It probably wouldn’t feel like the same thing for Crowley. This wouldn’t be _healing,_ and that was for the best. He’d had enough of healing for a while. But he wanted to see what it felt like anyway.

The nerves weren’t gone, not totally, but Crowley relaxed enough to drop his shoulders away from his ears and nod.

“If you’re sure…?” Aziraphale asked, settling his palms onto Crowley’s knees.

“Go for it. Sounds like it could be fun.”

His trousers were taken away from him, left on the lid of the trunk with the rest of his things. The bookshop had been busy, it seemed, or maybe Aziraphale had, because the shirt and waistcoat were already folded, and his coat had been relocated to the peg on the back of the door. His shoes, he noticed, were sitting in front of the fire, the stockings tucked inside. They’d be warm when he put them on next. He didn’t know if Aziraphale knew he knew about those little gestures, and he didn’t know if Aziraphale would stop if he called attention to them, but Crowley always noticed. Even right _now,_ he noticed. He just… didn’t know what to do with that kind of attention. That kind of care.

He’d learned decades ago that Aziraphale liked bringing him pleasure, liked making him come. He also liked making sure Crowley left his home with warm feet, and that was something else altogether. Crowley couldn’t blame that on the affair because Aziraphale had been doing little things like that since the beginning. Since the _Beginning,_ since the very first rain that fell on Earth.

Crowley’d had less time to get used to the sex than he’d had to the kindnesses, a few millennia longer, but he’d adapted to the sexual part of their relationship much faster. There was a give and take with sex that he could more easily understand—if they did it right, they both left happy. He _knew_ by now that sometimes Aziraphale did little things for him with no expectation of getting anything in return, and Crowley could even recognize he did the same sorts of things for the angel, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still affect him every time to find himself on the receiving end. He still wasn’t _used_ to it, and he sometimes wondered if he ever would be.

Aziraphale undressed himself, too, draped his nightshirt over the footboard and knelt, naked, between the legs of the demon in his bed. He took his sweet time, running his fingers up and down Crowley’s thighs long before moving them toward the place where his genitals were supposed to be. The angel’s hands were soft and warm and very, very real. Each brush of his fingertips lit up the nerves in Crowley’s corporation, making them sing. Making him tremble.

_‘Get on with it!’_ Crowley wanted to say, wanted to _scream,_ but he bit his lip and tangled his fists in the sheets and said nothing. He liked this. He _wanted_ slow and gentle and sensual right now, and his stupid panicky brain wouldn’t get to take that from him.

Being touched like this by Aziraphale was almost shocking. He was just so… so fucking careful with him, in a way that it was hard to fully process. He calculated each touch so he wouldn’t tug Crowley’s skin, or prod too hard, or scratch, so all he would do was work him over in steady, even motions. It wasn’t—the glamour was still up, Crowley knew, so the angel couldn’t _see_ that he was still hurt. This wasn’t Aziraphale handling him like he was delicate because he thought Crowley was injured, this was… this was just how he touched him. This was how he had _always_ touched him, it just felt so searingly _kind_ tonight because of how recently Crowley had felt the touch of other, crueler hands.

Which of the two was _normal_ for him, really? Was it the kindness, or the cruelty?

Part of him wanted to snap and snarl at Aziraphale, to argue that he didn’t need this, that he wasn’t something the angel could break. That part of him also wanted to hurry straight through all the foreplay and go right to the part where he was on his hands and knees getting fucked so hard that he couldn’t think anymore. Another part of him, though, wanted nothing more than to curl up in Aziraphale’s soft lap and feel those gentle hands rub circles against his back until he fell asleep.

“Are you ready?” Aziraphale asked him, his thumbs brushing over the blank and empty skin between Crowley’s legs.

Crowley nodded, and he didn’t even have time to be properly nervous about the upcoming unknown sensation before it was there, proving itself harmless. Proving itself shockingly… good. Within moments, Crowley found himself screwing his eyes shut in confused pleasure. Aziraphale’s hands were hot against his skin—not hot like heated metal, not like anything that would _burn,_ but hot like coffee pouring into a cold ceramic cup. Crowley canted his hips up into the touch out of some serpentine reflex that told him to chase that blissful warmth.

“Good?”

“Yeah, it’s… it’s just unexpected, like you said,” Crowley said, proud of how he managed to say all those words so clearly. “Good, though.”

Aziraphale smiled at him. “Good.”

He bit his lip just a little bit harder, holding back something like a whine as he felt the heat sinking into his skin. Sinking deeper still, through fat into muscle and bone. It began to condense. There was a small part of it that seemed to be hotter than the rest, a few inches below the surface and buried in muscle, and it pulsed and swirled like a tiny star trying to form. Crowley focused on that, focused on the feeling of Aziraphale’s thumbs working his plasticized corporation like clay in the hands of a potter.

It was probably quite the sight. Crowley thought about watching Aziraphale work, but he kept his eyes closed. He already knew what the process of making an Effort looked like—he’d done this to himself often enough, sometimes in front of a mirror out of curiosity. He’d even done this for Aziraphale, way back at the fragile start of their affair. What he wasn’t used to, though, was what this _felt_ like, and he wanted to savor it.

There was a straightforward answer to why it felt so good, he was sure. Novelty, in all likelihood. Perhaps the reason he was able to feel this so acutely, to feel the shift of each cell and fiber as his anatomy was lovingly rearranged, was because Aziraphale’s magic was less familiar than his own. He was getting new nerves put in, giving his directionless lust a physical outlet, and that was probably the only reason why he felt half out of his mind from this.

Crowley rocked back where he sat, supporting his weight on his hands behind him and spreading his thighs wider apart as Aziraphale sank two thick fingers inside a cunt that hadn’t existed three seconds ago, not until he willed it into being. It felt deliriously good to finally be touched like this. He felt every last millimeter of the stretch and slide like this was the first time he’d had Aziraphale inside him—and it was, in a way. All these nerves were brand new and sensitive, the muscles relaxed and eager after long minutes of Aziraphale’s external ministrations. His was a cunt that had never known what it was like to be empty, to be hungry to be filled, because Aziraphale had been there waiting to give his body what it wanted the moment he was ready for it.

“Fuck, that’s… that’s…” Crowley cut himself off with a low whine, deep in the back of his throat. Aziraphale’s thumb had found his clit and was rubbing circles around it, and he couldn’t help himself but rock his hips against the mattress.

“More?” His angel asked him, quirking an eyebrow. There was a beautiful, bastard smile on his face as he dragged his fingers back with agonizing slowness, as he opened them into a vee to tease Crowley mercilessly with the delicious stretch of them. As he sank them back inside, deeper than before, and pressed gently against a spot still warmed by the heat of his miracle.

“Please,” Crowley said, shameless and begging. “Please, more. Yes.”

“Would you like my mouth?” Aziraphale offered, wetting his lips with the tip of his pink tongue.

“Can I keep your fingers, too?”

Aziraphale laughed, bright and clear like the ringing of a bell. “Of course, you can, my darling. There isn’t a thing I’d deny you tonight.”

“Then yesssss,” Crowley answered him, not even noticing his hiss. “Please, yessss.”

He put a leg over Aziraphale’s shoulder, impatient, to draw the angel in closer, and Aziraphale laughed even harder, the pale slope of his back silently shaking with it even as he bowed his head over Crowley’s wet and eager body.

The first swipe of his tongue was gentle, a long lick up one of Crowley’s labia, like he was trying to get Crowley used to the idea of being touched like this without overwhelming him. His second was a bit more direct, a broad pass over his clit, followed immediately by a kiss to the scruffy swell of his mons. All the while, his fingers worked their slow and inexorable rhythm, in and out, twisting and spreading and pushing, making Crowley pant and hiss. Reducing him to a creature of need and response and desire.

Through his haze of pleasure, Crowley’s scattered mind registered another detail, something tiny and absurd. While his one leg was still over Aziraphale’s shoulder, scrabbling for purchase against the smooth skin of the angel’s back, his other foot had ended up somewhere between their bodies. Right in the palm of Aziraphale’s other hand, of all places. Crowley might have moved it, but it gave him purchase, gave him something to push back against even as the rest of him felt like it was moments from floating away from the earth altogether. Plus, Aziraphale’s hand was warm against the chill of Crowley’s scales, his thumb rubbing mindless circles against them where they sprouted above the hard bone of Crowley’s ankle.

_“Satan’s fucking tits,”_ he swore, arousal crackling through him like a current as Aziraphale changed his approach, closing those perfect lips around the swollen nub of his clit to kiss and lick and suck.

His head had been thrown back, his back arched, but the change in pressure and intensity made him curl in on himself, his body bending over Aziraphale’s until those snowy curls were pressed flat against his belly. His hands were roaming over the angel’s back, looking for somewhere to hold onto, his panting mouth pressing desperate kisses against the places Aziraphale’s wings would sprout from if he chose to bring them out. He felt the angel laughing beneath him, no doubt at his ridiculous profanity. Crowley couldn’t help but huff out a laugh of his own, half-hysterical but no less joyful for it.

_They didn’t even know._ Hell had hurt him today, sure. And they’d no doubt hurt him again—no way to avoid it, really, so unless they decided to destroy him, he’d have quite a lot of pain to look forward to for the rest of time. Random cruelty, official reprimands, the ever-looming terror of getting _caught…_ but suddenly, it felt like it didn’t matter anymore.

Crowley had been hurt today, but he’d _won._ He’d escaped, and Hell didn’t _know._ They didn’t know that, when he escaped, he’d really gotten away with so much more than just his temporary freedom. That he’d been _getting away with this_ for decades now. He got to have this, got to have the angel in his arms, warm and alive. He got to bring Aziraphale all the pleasure he wanted, got to _love him,_ even if he couldn’t say as much out loud. He got to have _this_ and they wouldn’t get to take it from him. Crowley wouldn’t let them. He’d destroy Hell itself before they could try.

“You’re so beautiful like this,” Aziraphale murmured between his legs, his lips moving warm and wet against Crowley’s inner thigh. Crowley looked down at him, saw the look in the angel’s eyes. It was devotion. Plain and simple, no other way to interpret it, and it made that coiled and aching thing at the center of Crowley’s being writhe and twist and hum.

Both of the angel’s hands were still occupied—his left still caressing the side of Crowley’s foot, his right still fucking him, still making a ruin of him. He couldn’t have taken the time to touch himself at all during this, but when Crowley leaned back to let his eyes wander lower, he saw that Aziraphale was still very erect. It was quite the picture, the angel kneeling so patiently at the side of his own bed, looking like he was almost painfully hard from nothing more than watching and tasting and feeling with his hands. And of course, it was just an absolutely gorgeous cock by any estimation, flushed dark and shiny at the tip, nestled in a thatch of blonde hair. Crowley wanted to get his hands on him, wanted to get his hands on _all_ of him, and then never let go again.

“You’re one to talk,” Crowley mumbled back, smiling, feeling like the liquid pleasure pulsing through his corporation was making his eyes go out of focus. He patted vaguely in the direction of Aziraphale’s arms, trying to offer to help him stand. “C’mon up here and fuck me, angel.”

“How would you like me?” Aziraphale asked, taking hold of one of Crowley’s arms and rising to his feet. For one long moment, all he did was run his fingers through Crowley’s hair and kiss him, his tongue tracing along the split where Crowley’s forked. Crowley could taste himself in the angel’s mouth, and it almost made up for the throbbing emptiness Aziraphale had left behind when he slid his fingers free of Crowley’s body. They pulled apart, both of them breathing hard in the shared space between them, and Aziraphale grinned. “I remember something about you wanting to ride me.”

When Crowley nodded, Aziraphale settled himself onto the narrow bed, his cock bobbing between his legs as he made his way on hands and knees towards the head of the bed. Crowley had been about to follow him when he looked back towards the door on reflex. An uncomfortable tension settled somewhere in his belly, fear prickling on the back of his neck like cold sweat.

“Actually,” he said, and it was far too loud. Aziraphale turned his head to look at him, puzzled. “I thought we might, y’know…” Crowley’s words failed him, so he tried to make his point with gestures. Thankfully, Aziraphale seemed to understand.

“At the foot of the bed?” Aziraphale asked.

“Yeah,” he said, trying to sound casual about it.

“Alright.”

No questions, no pushing, just easy acceptance. Aziraphale shifted himself around on the bed, settled himself into a sitting position supported by the footboard. Crowley exhaled, relief flowing quickly into the space his anxiety had just vacated. He didn’t _want_ to be staring at the door the whole time he had Aziraphale’s cock up him, but he knew that having it at his back would feel so much worse. This way, he’d be able to check over Aziraphale’s shoulder if he started feeling tense and then not have to worry about it again.

Aziraphale bit his lip and waggled his eyebrows like some kind of cartoon of a rakish seducer as he patted the tops of his thighs. Silly as it was, Crowley didn’t need much more urging than that. On its own, the angel’s lap already looked incredibly inviting.

With all the grace and care that one might show to a rag doll, Crowley swung his legs up onto the bed. He’d gotten as far as putting one up over Aziraphale’s thighs when he caught sight of his own feet and froze. He’d realized on some level that he’d likely had a few scales out—he almost always did, there was no way to get around it, really—but he hadn’t realized how _bad_ he’d let them get in his distraction.

The scales had crept all the way over both of his knees, to the point where it almost looked like he was wearing stockings. As it always was when he was in this in-between form, the scales had come in black and shiny on the outside of his calves and red on the insides and on the soles of his feet. And his feet— _fuck,_ his feet. They were even farther gone, the toes stretched out longer than normal and ending in sharp, dark claws.

Crowley’s apology was on the tip of his tongue when he noticed that Aziraphale’s hands had gone right back to his legs, his fingers playing along the seam where scales melted into humanoid skin.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, noticing the way Crowley was looking at him. He pulled his hands back, but not very far. They hovered close by, so close Crowley could still feel their warmth, his fingers spread like he wanted to touch him again. “I’m sorry. If you don’t like me doing that, I can stop. I just like the way they feel.”

And it suddenly occurred to Crowley that Aziraphale had… he _had_ been touching them. All night, really, ever since they got up here. Crowley’s foot must have been rasping at the angel’s back while he was eating him out, but instead of pushing it away he’d taken the other of them in his hand and stroked the scales like some humans played with worry stones.

“I don’t,” he said, his voice a bit tight. “Don’t mind it. You can if you want.”

Carefully, as if he were holding something made of glass, he took both of Aziraphale’s hands in his own and settled them back against his scales. As Aziraphale smiled, he felt a few more ripple out up the sides of his thighs, and Crowley wondered which of the two of them he’d thought had been the breakable one, here, really.

He’d let himself be convinced decades ago that Aziraphale meant it when he said he wasn’t afraid of Crowley’s more infernal features, that he wasn’t _disgusted_ by them… he just liked to keep things human-shaped between them, for the most part. Crowley was content to abide by those rules and keep himself contained as best he could. _Never let him see your eyes_ had been a guideline Crowley had followed mostly without issue for the last seven decades. He kept his sunglasses on, his wings tucked away, and tried to tamp down on his body’s tendencies to sprout claws and scales and the occasion bit of tail growth. It wasn’t hard, really, but it required concentration… which was something that was in desperately short supply tonight.

On top of it all, he felt a bit like he’d been flayed raw. He hadn’t been, not really. He’d not let the other demons get that far. Even still, underneath the glamour he’d applied, Crowley was aching and sore. Under the last of his bravado, he was tired right down to his bones. He was anxious and terrified and second-guessing himself, and he didn’t want to feel like he was disgusting. He’d been treated like a thing today in Hell, like he was just another pathetic creature with no lot in life but to take whatever mistreatment he was given. He’d been treated monstrously, and made to feel like he was no better than something monstrous in turn.

If Aziraphale had flinched away from his scales and his claws tonight, Crowley knew that it wouldn’t have mattered what explanations Aziraphale had told him in the past. It wouldn’t have been Aziraphale’s fault, and Crowley couldn’t have blamed him for an instinctive reaction any more than he could control his own irrational one. Even so, if Aziraphale had flinched, Crowley knew he would have felt like that low, hurting, wretched _thing_ all over again.

But… Aziraphale _hadn’t_ flinched. He’d touched him, and touched him again, and said that he liked the way Crowley’s scales felt under his warm, soft hands. He’d _seen him,_ and _touched him,_ and _looked at him,_ looked at him like he was a fucking person, and Crowley hadn’t realized just how much he needed that tonight. Just how much he’d needed to be seen.

“Can I... please. Can I take them off?” Crowley asked the question before he could stop himself. Before he could swallow it down. He spoke quickly, feeling himself shaking just enough that he feared Aziraphale would feel it, too. “Just for a moment, then I'll put them back on.”

He watched Aziraphale’s gaze track over his body, naked and bare from toe to tip, except…

_Except…_

“Your glasses?” Aziraphale said it quietly, tentatively. The angel’s eyes were huge, shiny in the firelight, a barely-there frown pinching his forehead. He looked as if he scarcely believed the words coming out of his own mouth, as if he were afraid of them, or perhaps what they could do. “Would that... would that be comfortable for you?”

“I… I don’t have to. It was just an idea.”

“No!” Aziraphale blurted, then caught himself when he saw Crowley flinch. “No, I meant… I meant that it doesn’t, ah. It doesn’t have to be. Just an idea, I mean.”

Crowley stared at him, frozen. He worked his jaw. Swallowed. “I’m going to need you to be clearer than that, angel.”

“Right, yes. You… you do.” Aziraphale flicked his eyes to the ceiling, closed them. Exhaled. Squared his shoulders. For all the tension in his posture, it looked every bit like he was preparing to face down a firing squad… until his hand came up, gentle as anything, and cupped Crowley’s cheek. A soft, wavering little smile broke through the stiffness in his face, and when his eyes opened again, there was something shy there. “Please. Feel free to take your glasses off. That’s all I meant to say. You don’t have to ask.”

Of all the things Crowley had been expecting Aziraphale to say, it hadn’t been that. He felt his mouth open and close, felt a troubling scratchiness in his throat. “Really?”

“Of course. If you want to show me your eyes, then I…” Aziraphale trailed off, looking for all the world like he was choosing his words with inhuman precision. When he spoke again, he sounded shockingly certain. “Then I want to see them. But only if you want it.”

“What happened,” Crowley began, then cleared his throat and tried a second time. “What happened to _not reminding each other of our sides?”_

The angel’s palm was warm against Crowley’s cheek, his thumb once again rubbing soothing circles into his skin. When had Crowley become such a fragile creature, to need to be gentled like this so many times in the same night?

“It is nice to pretend things are safer, sometimes, I admit,” Aziraphale told him, pressing a kiss to the tip of Crowley’s nose. “But it _is_ just pretending, isn’t it? No matter what, you’ll still be you, and I’ll still be me. We won’t ever be anyone else. We can still pretend, but…”

“But?”

“But if it stops being comfortable to pretend, we shouldn’t have to keep doing it.” The angel kissed his forehead. “I know who you are, and you know who I am. You don’t have to ask my permission to stop… hiding parts of yourself.”

There was a sudden absence in the world in that moment, and Crowley felt it like a missing stair in the darkness. A barrier, practically a law. A hard, uncrossable line. _“Don’t show him your eyes.”_ It was one of the rules he’d held himself to for the last seven decades of their affair. He’d gone as far as to write it down on paper—burned later, naturally—to help himself remember. And now, it was gone in an instant, with nothing left in its place. He didn’t even know where the next rule lay behind the place where it had once been.

If he could show him his eyes… What else might Aziraphale want to see?

Fuck, that was too many possibilities to consider right now, _especially_ for right now. For _tonight._ Still flighty, still bruised. Naked and dripping wet and halfway to orgasm. Crowley was almost regretting asking to take his glasses off, as he knew these bodies of theirs were capable of crying in extreme circumstances. The last thing he wanted to do was take them off and let Aziraphale see him leaking fluids out of all his facial holes.

But he _wasn’t_ regretting it, at least not enough to back away from something like this. Not once it was offered. He was going to seize this with both hands.

“Think I’ll close my eyes,” he said, aiming for some kind of a middle ground. “If that’s... if that’s alright.”

Aziraphale bit his lip. Swallowed. “If you like.”

Inch by inch, Crowley leaned forward. Rested his head on the angel’s shoulder, wrapped his arms around behind his back. Felt Aziraphale’s arms wrap around his own body in turn. Took a breath.

Crowley took his sunglasses off and set them on top of the trunk at the foot of the bed. He buried his face in the crook of Aziraphale’s neck and nuzzled him, eyes slipping closed, and basked in the feeling of his angel’s warmth against the thin skin of his eyelids.

It was a strange thing, to be so suddenly aware of doing something for the first time. After nearly six thousand years, Crowley had very few _firsts_ left, but this was one of them. This was the first time Aziraphale had ever touched his face while it was bare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Context Spoiler:**  
>  Crowley is still concealing his injuries, and even though he’s being gentle, Aziraphale nudges them by accident a few times and causes Crowley some mild pain and discomfort. Also, by withholding that information, it made it so Aziraphale didn’t really get to take precautions to avoid hurting Crowley like he would have wanted to. THAT SAID, it’s 100% Crowley’s call about when and how he discloses details about his abuse, so I’m not trying to say “boo, Crowley u liar” here. It’s just a really sticky situation all around.  
> Crowley is _also_ in a bad mental health moment when he decides that he wants to have sex, and it doesn’t magically get better when his trousers come off. I really dislike the idea of calling any part of this “dubcon,” given that Crowley has agency and is pretty vocal about what he wants and how he wants it. He’s definitely interested in having sex, even though what he mostly wants is to be held. However, he is in a _very_ unhealthy headspace and it doesn’t occur to him that he could just ask for a snuggle outright. Basically, he’s treating sex as cuddling with extra steps (plus a bonus orgasm), rather than as sex-for-sex’s-sake. Interpret it however you will, but from my standpoint, I’m reluctant to judge either of them for it.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Fun News:** No historical notes, but I wanted to share a bit of personal good news. Last week, seven (7!) unattended chickens showed up in our back yard, and after being told by all of our nearest neighbors that no one knew where they came from, my wife and I went a little… wild. In the past week, we’ve heavily researched chicken care, built an entire chicken coop, and settled into the idea that if these apparently are _our_ chickens, now, we are going to get hardcore with it. [We’re chicken farmers now, y’all!](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/779198579301679134/806726097835393034/20210203_161618.jpg)  
> … and then a few days later, an EIGHTH chicken turned up _on top of_ our coop, so we have chicken-napped her, too. It’s… a lot of chickens, especially when one is accustomed to having zero chickens.
> 
> Chapter 21 is going up **Thursday, February 18th**. I’ll keep posting snippets on tumblr for WIP Wednesday (and maybe even more pictures of our chickens), and will update y’all if (Someone forbid) this thing grows ten extra chapters. :’)


	21. Seen and Unseen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What he wanted was to feel normal. To feel wanted, desirable. Liked. _Loved,_ even if only in the most fleeting of ways. Aziraphale was laughing with him now, and _fuck,_ that felt right. He was playing with him, teasing him, keeping him in suspense—not out of cruelty or a desire for control, but for no other reason than so he could reward him with greater satisfaction in another moment or two. Crowley realized… he realized how much he wanted this, too. He wanted to feel _light,_ like he wasn’t bowed under the weight of what he carried. He wanted to be someone Aziraphale could play around with while they fucked, someone he didn’t worry over. Someone whose body wasn’t the site of six millennia of grief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, y'all! This chapter is early because of three things:  
> 1) I was too excited that I got it done to sit on it another week.  
> 2) I realized that if I scoot my posting schedule up by one week, the last chapter will post on my birthday week.  
> 3) There is, of all the silly things, a _blizzard_ possible soon in my part of the world (in Texas—see, I said it was silly), and just the last three days of ice and sleet have knocked my internet out already. I don’t know when it’ll be fixed, or if a blizzard will keep it knocked out, or if I’ll be spending this coming Thursday providing body heat to eight half-frozen chickens… so I hauled my laptop with me on a grocery shopping run and posted on public wi-fi while I could.
> 
> If you’re looking to delay reading relationship/breakup angst, do not worry. This chapter is still somewhat honeymooney, which is a real word I just invented.
> 
> **Content Notes:**  
>  Crowley imagines a scenario where Aziraphale might be unexpectedly rough with him while they’re having sex (specifically, by grabbing/yanking his hair). Even though it might ordinarily be something he’d be into, the possibility is upsetting to consider so soon after what happened to him in Hell. The thing he imagines does not happen.
> 
> Additional CW for mental health/trauma talk in the (massive) end note. It isn’t detailed at all, and isn’t about _me,_ so if the idea of encountering super personal info is uncomfortable for you, do not worry. It’s more about the story themes than anything else, but I still wanted to give a heads-up for that anyway.
> 
> Sex acts in this chapter: vaginal intercourse, masturbation, pearl necklace _(idk if that’s the perfect term but my wife suggested it and it sounded cute and also more concise than “nutting on your buddy’s chest on request”),_ & much needed post-coital snuggles ;)  
> Crowley keeps his brand-new vulva and finds some fun new things to do with it. Aziraphale’s penis from last chapter remains attached to him and, by all accounts, has a great time of it.  
> Also, _(and I_ know _that saying this next thing for this specific fic, especially 21 chapters in, may sound a bit like, “hi guys, just as an FYI, this carton of eggs contains eggs as an ingredient”)_ the sex in this chapter is pretty emotional at times.

One of Aziraphale’s hands cupped the back of Crowley’s neck, his palm hot against Crowley’s skin. Crowley rolled his head into the angel’s touch, letting out a hiss of pleasure as the angel’s hand squeezed the tight muscles of the spot where his skull met his spine.

“You know, you’ve made me very happy tonight,” Aziraphale murmured into his hair.

“I have?” Crowley asked him, his eyes popping back open—still hidden against Aziraphale’s neck, of course, but he couldn’t just sit there in darkness after hearing a thing like that.

“Yes,” the angel mused, squeezing a tense spot on Crowley’s neck and working the muscle with steady fingers. “It, ah. It makes me happy when you can tell me what you want. I know we can’t… ah. Can’t always be the most open with one another. And I know that there are times… there are always going to be times we want different things. It’s the nature of… of who and what we are, I think.” Aziraphale sighed, his breath ruffling Crowley’s hair. There was a little note of sadness in his voice that Crowley wanted to chase away. “But I like hearing what you want all the same.”

“So, what did I do that made you happy?”

Aziraphale paused for a moment, his fingers drumming on the back of Crowley’s neck as he searched for his words. They resumed their massaging as the angel began to speak—slowly, as if he were feeling out each word in his mouth before he said it, like he was searching for sharp edges so he could file them down before they could cut anyone.

“You can be, ah… Well. I’ve known you a long time, Crowley. An awfully long time. And while I haven’t known you quite that long in, ah… in the Biblical sense… I do know how much you struggle sometimes with asking me for what you want. And I’ve always known that you don’t… you don’t tell me when things are wrong. You don’t tell me when you’re hurt.”

Crowley tensed in the angel’s arms, his eyes staring at the door across the room. He couldn’t have this conversation right now. He was entirely too naked, entirely too vulnerable. He didn’t even have his glasses on.

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean… I don’t ever want to hurt you, Crowley. I never want to do something you don’t want, or—or forget about your comfort, especially in the pursuit of my own. I also never want to force you to tell me things, and I never want to make you think I’m owed an explanation of any kind.” One of his hands stroked along the long bony column of his spine. It was relaxing, yes, but Crowley wasn’t ready to drop his guard so soon. “But it does put my mind at ease when you _do_ tell me what you want, what I’m doing right. Even if it’s hard for you to speak up— _especially_ when it’s hard for you. I like knowing what it is that you like. That’s all that I meant by it. You’ve been very direct with me tonight, and I liked it.”

A thin little thread of guilt tugged up through what passed for guts in this only vaguely human body. _Direct,_ Aziraphale called it. Crowley had been lying and evading and concealing all night. For fuck’s sake, he still had a glamour up covering parts of his corporation from the angel. He didn’t feel like someone who’d been very direct.

He shifted tactics, deflected with a joke. “Now you’ve done it, angel. You’ve opened Pandora’s box and you can’t shut it again. You’ll never again know peace. Not that I wasn’t already opinionated, mind. But now you can’t complain about it.”

“Good!” Aziraphale said, laughing. “I think tonight has been rather lovely, with you setting the pace and all that. I’d be quite happy if you initiated more often in the future, picked the setting and the activities, as it were.”

Crowley’s mind struggled to switch tracks. He’d thought he’d understood what they’d been talking about, thought this had been about his too visible fear and his too transparent attempts at getting it under control, but—

“Wait,” he said, putting his lips to Aziraphale’s shoulder and blowing out a breath. “Have you been talking about sex?”

“I was, yes, for the most part. I suppose it could apply to other contexts, but primarily I was saying that I appreciated that you felt comfortable enough to be vocal about your desires tonight. We’re lovers, Crowley. If nowhere else, we should be able to be honest with one another in bed… or the sofa, I suppose. Or the floor. We’ve wound up on the floor a number of— _mmf!”_

The angel laughed against Crowley’s lips as he kissed him, but his mouth opened for him all the same as the kiss grew more urgent. It had taken Crowley a few seconds to process Aziraphale’s words, to process their _implications,_ but he got there eventually. He heard the word, heard the _name_ that Aziraphale had given this thing of theirs, that he had given to _them._ How could he wait even a second longer to kiss him?

“Lovers?” He repeated, his forehead pressed to Aziraphale’s. Crowley was so caught up in the moment, in the desire to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood, that he failed to notice that—for the first time in _decades_ —he was looking into Aziraphale’s blue eyes without the filter of his sunglasses between them.

“Yes?” Aziraphale said, hesitant. His eyes were wide, staring at Crowley, _searching,_ and it was only then that Crowley noticed his mistake. His eyes were probably fully yellow right now, too… Even if Aziraphale said didn’t _mind_ seeing them, Crowley was sure that being stared at by unblinking snake eyes could wither all but the most tenacious of erections. He tucked his face back against the side of the angel’s neck again.

“Haven’t heard you call it that before,” Crowley said, muffled.

“Is there something wrong with the word? Would you prefer another? I only… I picked up from the humans. And their books. It’s common in this century for, ah. For arrangements similar to ours. But if you don’t like it…”

The angel sounded nervous. Fidgety. He was using that tone of voice he used when he was trying to indirectly request that he wanted a little emotional distance from something that scared him. Crowley couldn’t begrudge him that. Not ever, but especially not tonight. Especially not after the day he’d had himself.

“Call it anything you like,” Crowley said, soft and indulgent, as he watched the fire crackle in the hearth behind them. “You won’t… disturb my sensibilities, or anything. We’re not quite human, yeah, but their words usually work better than anything your lot comes up with. Or mine, most of the time, though we demons _did_ invent some of the more amusing swear words.”

“Liar,” Aziraphale said, no harshness at all in it, as he pressed his lips to the top of Crowley’s head. It sounded like some of the tension was starting to bleed out of him, and for that, Crowley was grateful. “We both know that the humans always beat you to it.”

“True. They do come up with the strangest expressions. Remember all the shit Will made up?” Crowley pressed their bare chests together, squeezed his thighs on either side of Aziraphale’s lap. He affected a ridiculous, stilted delivery, and said, “Like _making the beast with two backs.”_

To his surprise and delight, he felt Aziraphale’s cock—softened somewhat, over the last few long and emotionally draining minutes—stir and twitch between their bodies.

“We could, you know,” Aziraphale said, playing at being casual and disaffected. “If you still wanted to, of course.”

_“If I still wanted to?”_ Crowley repeated, grinning against the angel’s neck. He kissed him there, right over his pulse point. Swiped his tongue over his heartbeat and savored the shudder he got in response. “Angel, if you want me to be _honest in bed,_ I suppose I’m required to tell you that I’ve been _dying_ to get your cock up me since I saw you in your slippers downstairs.”

“Well,” Aziraphale answered, hands roaming lower to get ahold of Crowley’s bony hips. There was a bruise on one of them, faint by now but still tender. Crowley closed his eyes tight and focused on the better parts of having Aziraphale’s hands on him. The strength in his fingers, the warmth of his palm, the steady security of being held. “I suppose I should get to it, then. I’d hate for you to die.”

“You laugh, but it’s true,” Crowley babbled, grinning, feeling like he was fucking soaring from just hearing that one little word. He shimmied his hips upward as Aziraphale— _his lover_ —moved a hand beneath him to lift Crowley’s backside off of his lap. “I am in grave danger, angel, and the only thing that can save me is being shagged until my eyes cros— _ssssssfng._ That’s unfair, angel. You’re killing me faster, here.”

Aziraphale only bit his lip and lifted Crowley’s hips a fraction higher still, away from the crumb of stimulation he’d just given him. His other hand was around his own cock, and Crowley could just imagine the way it looked—pink and shiny at the head from where he’d just rubbed it around the spit-slick mess of Crowley’s cunt.

Crowley twisted his arms around the back of Aziraphale’s neck, both to ensure his face stayed hidden and so he could give himself better leverage, and rocked back until the tip of Aziraphale’s cock was almost in him. Until he felt it nudge, blunt and hot, like a promise of something more to come. He felt Aziraphale’s laughter reverberating through his own chest.

“I thought you might like an _aperitif,_ dear,” Aziraphale murmured in his ear, placing open mouthed kisses along the side of Crowley’s throat. “A little something to stimulate your appetite.”

The angel’s hold on him was loose, supporting Crowley’s weight without restraining his movement. Aziraphale was toying with him, hinting at giving him the penetration Crowley wanted and then pulling back… but he wasn’t _denying_ Crowley anything. If Crowley wanted to, he could end this little game right here and now. He could sit down on his lover’s lap and he knew Aziraphale would give him what he wanted, would fuck him the way he’d been asking him to all night.

He thought about doing just that, about pushing back harder, about fucking himself hard and fast on his angel’s firebrand cock. About racing through the start of this to get to the part where he was sweaty and happy and unable to think in words anymore. Instead, he held himself back just a little while longer. True, Crowley _had_ gone upstairs tonight with the goal of getting his brains fucked out, with the goal of turning his thoughts off and replacing them with pleasurable distraction. He still wanted that, yes, but he didn’t _only_ want that.

What he wanted was to feel normal. To feel wanted, desirable. Liked. _Loved,_ even if only in the most fleeting of ways. Aziraphale was laughing with him now, and _fuck,_ that felt right. He was playing with him, teasing him, keeping him in suspense—not out of cruelty or a desire for control, but for no other reason than so he could reward him with greater satisfaction in another moment or two. Crowley realized… he realized how much he wanted this, too. He wanted to feel _light,_ like he wasn’t bowed under the weight of what he carried. He wanted to be someone Aziraphale could play around with while they fucked, someone he didn’t worry over. Someone whose body wasn’t the site of six millennia of grief.

…Good thing the glamour was still up, then. It was a simple bit of magic, an illusion with an on/off switch. He didn’t have to think about it. It would stay up until he banished it, and Aziraphale could keep looking at him like someone he could have fun with, rather than someone he’d have to pity.

“You are,” Crowley groaned, complaining even as his smile grew wider into a grin, “a bastard.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed, giving a put-on little pout, and lifting his hips just enough to tease. “But you like it.”

_Honesty in bed…_

“Love it,” Crowley gasped as he finally, _finally_ felt himself start to stretch around the tip of Aziraphale’s cock.

_Love you,_ he thought, and bit his lip. There were still some things he couldn’t ever expect to say out loud.

It was a journey of millimeters, of sweet intrusion and heat, as Aziraphale slid himself home. Crowley thought, nonsensically, of the sword cane downstairs, about how well it fit into its sheath, so well that no one looking at it from the outside could tell two pieces and not a single whole. He found himself longing to open himself up the rest of the way, to crack his corporation open like the shell of an oyster and let Aziraphale pour inside whatever hid beneath, let him discover all the frostbitten places of himself that had been left empty for too long.

“I never have gotten used to this,” Aziraphale murmured against the shell of Crowley’s ear. His voice was steady, but Crowley could hear the strain in it, the hitch in his breath. “How good it feels.”

“Y-yeah,” Crowley answered him, hissing in a breath at the feeling of Aziraphale bottoming out. “Me either.”

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Crowley was the first to shake himself out of that initial rush of mutual pleasure, the first to do something, _anything_ besides feel. Even then, all he could do was wrap his arms just a bit tighter around the angel’s sturdy torso and squeeze him like the serpent he was. Regardless, it seemed to get Aziraphale’s attention, too, and his hands slid down from Crowley’s hips to the tops of his thighs. At first, he seemed content just to stroke him there, hands flat and broad, but soon enough his fingers were slipping in between their bodies, finding the still-sensitive, still swollen nub of Crowley’s clit.

Crowley’s lungs forced out the breath they’d been holding, along with a desperate little sound that was almost a whine. He found himself helpless to do anything else in response to the angel’s gentle ministrations but writhe beneath them. To do anything but grind forward into the touch, grind backwards onto Aziraphale’s cock. To circle his hips, slow and needy and greedy, trying to feel everything at once without pressing too hard on some part of his body that still hurt.

It was the world’s best feedback loop, because as he shifted and writhed more and more, the noises were that rumbled through the angel’s chest and spilled from his lips got louder, got _better._ Aziraphale moved beneath him, canted his hips up into the heartbeat-heat of Crowley’s body, and in turn Crowley clung to him even harder, fucked himself in the angel’s lap that much more insistently.

His hands were roaming the angel’s back, stroking and petting as he grasped and groped for more skin to touch, for more ways to hold and be held. They found their way to Aziraphale’s shoulder blades, to the places Crowley knew his wings would erupt from if he chose to bring them out from the other plane where they were tucked away, where skin would transition to feathers if he chose to make them physical. Only half-conscious of what he was doing with his hands, Crowley found himself kneading the flesh there, right over those two very particular spots, and it took until Aziraphale gasped for him to notice. Crowley stopped moving, but then Aziraphale started to babble in his ear.

“No, no. Please keep doing that. It, ah… _ah._ It feels good. Your hands there. Right where they are.”

“Can you…” he began, resuming the gentle touches to his angel’s back, “You can’t feel that on your… on your wings, can you?”

Aziraphale shook his head, hard, his breathing coming out in breathless huffs. “No. Not as such, no. But I can—”

The angel cut himself off, a low moan building in the back of his throat. Crowley chased the moan with his teeth, nibbling up the side of Aziraphale’s neck, careful not to leave Aziraphale bruised—he didn’t think he could stand to see such a thing—and savored the way the angel wiggled under his ministrations.

“But?” He prompted, eager to hear the rest. There was an image in his mind of his own fingers, buried to the knuckles in snow white feathers that were softer than any Earthly substance, and he needed an alternative mental picture to fixate on before he suggested something else demanding tonight.

_“But,”_ Aziraphale said, turning his head to kiss up the side of Crowley’s jaw, “I like your hands there.”

Crowley found himself grinning at the simplicity of it, and squeezed his lover’s plush, strong body even tighter against himself. “Fair. S’good enough for me, angel.”

“It’s good, it is, it’s so—ah— _oh!”_

Aziraphale was starting to lose track of his words, which was an excellent development. Crowley moved with more urgency. Not _faster,_ not exactly, as he still wanted to make this _good_ for the angel, as he still didn’t want to end up letting his own soreness get the better of him—or, for that matter, that bit of lingering animal fear that told him to push his own body to its limits and beyond them. But he did find the two of them a pace that felt more deliberate, that felt a little closer to scratching that desperate itch for sensation and motion.

If Aziraphale’s scrabbling hands and ragged breathing were anything to go by, the angel seemed to like it, too. Crowley found himself grinning against the sweat-damp skin of Aziraphale’s neck, panting with the effort of keeping up their new rhythm. His thighs burned so very sweetly from exertion, the good kind of pain that was so much more enjoyable to focus on than the tug and pull of the bruising on one hip and the mostly healed scrapes on his knees.

He was vaguely aware of the fact that he seemed to be hurtling towards the last reserves of his stamina so much faster tonight than it usually took him. It made sense, he supposed, as much as it was somewhat embarrassing. He’d felt stretched thin already _before_ he got to work bouncing on Aziraphale’s lap like a rowboat on a choppy sea. Crowley knew that it was likely that he was only awake right now at all because his body was still running on adrenaline. If he slowed down, if he _stopped,_ he might just collapse.

_Right._ Best not slow down, then.

Crowley dug his thumbs into those spots on Aziraphale’s back, kneading and pressing into them like he was trying to work a stubborn knot out of the angel’s muscles. Tilted Aziraphale’s head to the side and pressed a fiery line of kisses, open-mouthed and wet, from his collarbone up to his jaw. He licked and nipped, tasted the angel’s sweat on his tongue and felt his pulse thundering against his lips. The angel moaned and gasped at each touch, working his fingers against Crowley’s clit in feverish little circles like he was _trying_ to kill him with pleasure. His other hand crept up Crowley’s spine, his shoulders, his neck, until it nestled in his hair and matched those same urgent touches with soft scratches against Crowley’s scalp.

Some tiny, terrified part of his mind tried to be afraid of it, tried to invent a scenario where Aziraphale might grab a fistful of Crowley’s hair _(tight, far too tight)_ and yank back his head to expose his throat. It was a scenario that Crowley knew for a certainty would be devastatingly arousing under any other circumstances… besides the specific ones of tonight. Crowley ignored that thought, shut it away like he had so many others today. He was too far gone, though, to stop his corporation from overreacting. To stop his pulse from racing uncomfortably fast, from feeling the prickle of sweat on his palms. From glancing back over the angel’s shoulder at the locked door behind them.

No such thing ever happened. He wasn’t grabbed. The angel’s hands were gentle and didn’t try to restrain him, didn’t even suggest that they might. The only thing Aziraphale did was shift his hand down to Crowley’s jaw and gently tilt his chin upwards. For all the hazy lust in the angel’s eyes there was joy there, too, almost blinding when he looked at Crowley’s face.

“Kiss me?” Aziraphale asked him on an exhale. “Please?”

Crowley couldn’t help but snort out a quiet, half-hysterical laugh as he tilted his head to the side to give his lover what he wanted. It was incredible, almost surreal. Seventy years of this affair, and there was still a hint of uncertainty in the angel’s question, even though he asked it while he and Crowley were _actively in the process of fucking._

“You don’t have to ask me that every time,” he said, panting, between frantic kisses. “Especially— _hnn_ —especially if you’re already balls deep in me when you ask it.”

“I want to,” Aziraphale said, something immovable and stubborn in his tone. He kissed him again, searing and hungry. “Because I like it. I like it when you tell me _yes.”_

Crowley was grateful his eyes were closed during the kiss, because they _burned._ His eyes were burning, and his throat felt tight, and his ribs hurt in a way that couldn’t be excused away by any lingering soreness. He choked out some kind of miserable sound, all brittle and cracked and aching, forced out of his throat more by the agonizing gentleness of this moment than the driving thrusts where their two bodies connected. Crowley tried to bury the sound in the damp heat of Aziraphale’s mouth, but he was sure it was loud enough that even She heard it.

Because his body was a wretched little thing today, uncooperative and hungry and terrified as any wild beast that slipped free of the walls of Eden, Crowley’s orgasm took him entirely by surprise. One moment, he was fighting his way through a fog of arousal and emotion, trying to remember how to disconnect his tear ducts. The next, he was panting and trembling and falling apart, each muscle tensing up in waves of spasming ecstasy before leaving him tingly and far more relaxed than he thought was possible. Aziraphale had slowed his thrusting but kept up the steady rhythm of a thumb around his clit. He stayed like that, working him through to the very end, until Crowley had the presence of mind to disentangle one of his arms and vaguely tap in the direction of the angel’s hand to tell him he was done.

Somehow, in all of this, Crowley had slumped forward against the angel’s body. He was disinclined to move, content to bask in the pleasure coursing through his veins like hot, thick syrup… until he registered the fact that Aziraphale was still unsatisfied.

“C’n finish, angel,” he murmured, slurring only a little.

He felt Aziraphale chuckle underneath him, then he was being shifted. Lifted, oh so delicately. The angel’s cock, still hard, slipped free of his body. Crowley’s cunt gave a few weak pulses as he withdrew, as the very last tiny droplets of pleasure were squeezed out of his well-fucked body. If Crowley had thought that he had felt like an oversaturated sponge earlier in the night, well. No longer. Now he felt like he was thoroughly, wonderfully wrung-out.

Aziraphale settled Crowley in his lap, still upright-ish but with both of his legs on the same side now and his head propped against Aziraphale’s shoulder. He watched as the angel reached down and got a hand around his own cock, played at the head of it with a few languid strokes. His fingers slid around the velvety skin of it easily, soaked as his cock was in Crowley’s slick.

“Could do that for you,” Crowley complained, entirely without heat. He pressed a string of vague kisses to whatever part of the angel’s body was in front of his mouth—his chest, maybe. The part of him that contained his heart.

“Forgive the observation, dear,” Aziraphale said, quirking an eyebrow, “But you seem a bit knackered at the moment.”

“Sorry.”

“No, no. I don’t mind it.” His angel ducked his head and kissed him on the temple. “I’m terribly close. I won’t be long at all.”

“Well…” Crowley cracked a lazy, satisfied smile. He stretched in Aziraphale’s lap, enjoying the slow-blooming soreness in a few new places that he’d actually want to let linger. “Always have loved watching you wank.”

Aziraphale shifted where he sat, trying to provide the best view. He gave himself another slow pump and let his head drop back against the footboard. Crowley hadn’t been lying, he really did genuinely love watching the angel take himself apart, almost as much as he loved being held like this against Aziraphale’s plush body.

… The only trouble was, someone had clearly snuck up on him and replaced his eyelids with a pair of cunning replicas made out of solid lead. Crowley realized he lost a few precious seconds when noticed that Aziraphale’s breathing had gone all ragged and uneven, and when he wrenched open his eyes— _when had he closed them, and for what fucking reason?_ —he saw how fast Aziraphale’s hand was moving now. Saw that transported, tense look on Aziraphale’s face. It would all be over soon, and he was going to miss it. No, that was unacceptable. He didn’t want to miss any part of this, not for any reason. Least of all because his body decided to pass out on him.

Crowley pushed himself sideways out from under Aziraphale’s arm, settled down on the mattress with his face next to the angel’s hip.

“On me,” he mumbled, then rephrased it as a question. “Could you? On me?”

He felt the mattress shift as Aziraphale rolled halfway over. Crowley opened his eyes again and saw the angel leaning over him, hand still working over his cock. Aziraphale was kneeling now, supporting his weight against the footboard with his other arm, and his thighs were trembling. With a smile, Crowley pressed himself around whichever of the angel’s curves he could reach and let his eyelids flutter shut. Without having to worry about visual stimulus, he could focus on the sound of the angel’s half-muffled moans. The sound of his hand on slick flesh. The warmth of his thighs. The warmth of his spend as it splashed across Crowley’s bruised ribs and dripped down his chest, into that little patch of wiry hair over his sternum.

After that, things were blurry. He was aware that his head ended up in Aziraphale’s fucking phenomenal lap, one of the angel’s hands stroking his back. He heard a joke he only halfway understood, something about the two of them getting glued together, then felt the soft prickle of an angelic miracle moving across his skin to clean him.

Most of all, though, what Crowley was aware of was that he felt safe. As the last of his adrenaline faded, he let himself melt out of reality and into the soft dark behind his eyelids.  


* * *

It was such a strange thing, seeing Crowley sleep. Aziraphale knew that the demon did sleep, of course, and he’d seen him do it many times before tonight. Usually, though, it only came at the end of a night of heavy drinking. Right now, though, they were both utterly sober—not counting that dram each of Talisker they’d had downstairs, and that had been several hours ago at this point. Seeing Crowley sleeping while Aziraphale was clear-headed enough to enjoy it was a rare treat. Seeing him sleep beside him, in _Aziraphale’s bed,_ his face buried in Aziraphale’s lap… it was a luxury to which Aziraphale was yet unaccustomed. Dangerously domestic in a way he knew with certainty he could get well and properly used to, if given half a chance.

While he was asleep, Crowley was still in a way he never was when awake. The serpent was a creature of constant motion, constant change and curiosity, and he almost never let himself rest where Aziraphale could see him. Like this, though, he seemed so very relaxed. Unguarded in a way he never let himself be otherwise.

With a lessened chance of getting caught staring, Aziraphale let himself look his fill. His eyes lingered on the demon’s tousled hair, on the casual sprawl of long limbs. The long-fingered hands held in loose fists beside his hidden face. Those darling scales on his legs, still not receded back under human-like skin after all this time. The changed shape of his feet, now clawed, that lit up Aziraphale's imagination with curiosity about the ways that other parts of Crowley’s body might change if he decided to shift himself further.

…The raised edges of the scarring on Crowley’s shoulder blades, right where the roots of his dark wings might emerge.

So many things Aziraphale never got to see, all on casual display when the demon was too tired to hide himself. He felt a tendril of guilt stirring in his belly, questioning if he was taking advantage by looking at Crowley like he was right now. Aziraphale stopped letting his eyes roam wherever they pleased, turned his attention back to Crowley’s head, to the tiny sliver of his cheek that was still visible. This was more than enough of a pleasure. There was no need to be greedy.

Sleep had come to Crowley all at once, abruptly enough that Aziraphale hadn’t even really noticed how quickly the serpent was fading—one moment they’d been making love, and the next, Crowley had been unconscious. Aziraphale could have laughed if he hadn’t been afraid of waking him.

He shouldn’t have worried, though. Whatever exhaustion had been weighing on Crowley all night had pulled him so deeply under that seemingly nothing quieter than a freight train horn would rouse him. He didn’t wake when Aziraphale scooped him up in his arms and moved them both to the head of the bed, nor when he slipped under the sheets with him and tucked the quilts up over Crowley’s shoulders. He wouldn’t have moved him, but Aziraphale had seen the gooseflesh on the demon’s arms, the heat of the hearth not enough to chase away the chill, and he’d decided it was worth taking the risk of waking him if it meant he could keep him comfortable.

Aziraphale knew that he would likely have to rouse Crowley eventually. They had a meeting scheduled for nine in the morning, and even if they postponed it, they would still need to discuss the upcoming business with the Arrangement in enough time to make their plans. Besides, Crowley had been known to, on occasion, sleep for _years_ at a time. He couldn’t stay in Aziraphale’s bedroom for _years,_ no matter how appealing that thought sounded. Even if Aziraphale put wards around him to hide him, put an illusion over his sleeping form to render him invisible—or perhaps to disguise him as a pile of books—that kind of spell work was only reliable at diverting _human_ attention. If Gabriel popped in for one of his thankfully infrequent in-person check-ins, Aziraphale couldn’t risk having his lover anywhere nearby, especially if he were unconscious and vulnerable, too.

His _lover._

Aziraphale closed his eyes, sank his head all that much harder into the soft pillow beneath it, and felt his face heat. Goodness, he truly was a bit of a disaster sometimes, wasn’t he?

Because he _had_ said that tonight. Out loud, where Crowley could hear him. The serpent had seemed so surprised by it, too, and that thought settled uncomfortably in Aziraphale’s belly. Calling the two of them “lovers” seemed like the simplest designation for their connection, but it sounded like Crowley hadn’t been thinking of them in that same way. Surely, he must have had some name for it, even in the privacy of his own head. What _had_ Crowley been calling their relationship for all these years? He’d seemed to like the sound of it once he heard it, though, or at least he didn’t mind it. He hadn’t even made fun of Aziraphale for it, even in jest, which was a good sign that Aziraphale hadn’t insulted him.

It would be the best thing to do, in any case, to control himself in future. To keep from making any other rash declarations of an emotional nature. Theirs was a complicated enough situation as it was, so there was no reason to make it any more fraught. No reason to let himself grow attached to the idea of keeping Crowley here in his bed, to fantasize too strongly that this shop might someday become a home to them both. It couldn’t happen.

There wasn’t anything approximating a formal commitment between them, and there never could be. Aziraphale knew that Crowley didn’t belong to him. Aziraphale even knew that he didn’t belong to himself—neither of them owned themselves, and that was the point. One tiny word couldn’t change much at all, even if it turned out Crowley _did_ like to think of the two of them as lovers. The word—the word didn’t even matter. Substitute any other synonym and they’d still be on opposite sides of a gulf that neither of them could ever cross.

So, of course, there was no reason for Aziraphale to set himself up for disappointment here. No reason to imagine a world where Crowley would stay here in bed after the sun rose, that he would decide to carve himself out a home in the bookshop, right here at Aziraphale’s side. They _always_ parted at dawn. As much as he hated it, it was a habit that kept Aziraphale in check. He needed to constrain himself within structure like this, or he would try to ask for things that weren’t possible for either of them to give… if Crowley would even _want_ to give such things.

Not that it mattered, anyway. Just like the words they used to describe themselves didn’t matter. They were already closer than it was safe for them to be, and nothing closer was possible, regardless of their wishes. The weight of responsibility on their shoulders was just too great to ever risk anything more. They had been assigned to opposing roles, and there would always be distance between them.

Tonight, Aziraphale supposed, was another reminder of that fact. He had accepted from the very beginning that his and Crowley’s friendship would require them to lie to one another on a regular basis. Still, there were days when it became clear to him just how little they could share with one another, and how powerless he was to make Crowley’s existence any easier.

No matter how calm he looked in sleep, Aziraphale knew that something was wrong. He knew that Crowley _had_ been out of sorts tonight. Tense. Distressed. Aziraphale would have had to have been drunk, blindfolded, and concussed to have missed it. Crowley had been flighty and just a bit erratic, especially when he’d first arrived, and all night he’d kept looking over his shoulder whenever he thought Aziraphale hadn’t been paying attention. It was worrying, especially given how persistently Crowley seemed to want to pretend that everything was fine.

Aziraphale could have asked him, he knew, could have pushed for an explanation. Part of him had wanted to, but he knew it wasn’t his right to demand that kind of disclosure. Heaven knew that Aziraphale himself kept a lot of things from his demon—or, rather, Heaven _didn’t_ know, and that was the point. If they were in danger of being discovered, he trusted that Crowley would tell him. It would be both of their lives forfeit, after all.

If potential discovery weren’t what had Crowley on edge, Aziraphale could only assume it had been some business for Hell, which was another reason why he didn’t feel like he could ask about it. They didn’t tell one another classified information—that had always been part of the way they dealt with one another, and it hadn’t changed since they began making love. Their first loyalties were still to their sides, of course, and there was no reason to bring the minutiae of office politics into their bedchamber.

At this point, after having the whole night to think it over, Aziraphale’s assumption was that Crowley had probably come here after a difficult job. As much as Crowley tried to deny it, the worst of humanity’s cruelties often got under the demon’s skin and left him shaken. If Aziraphale lived another six thousand years, he’d never be able to forget the sight of Crowley slumped over in a Spanish tavern all those centuries ago, drinking like he was trying to discorporate himself and bitter that it hadn’t worked.

He’d also never be able to forget what Crowley had told him a few hours later, in one of the rooms upstairs. _It wasn’t me,_ he’d said. _You have to believe me. Please, believe me._

Aziraphale had taken confession from humans thousands of times, but never from a demon, and never like that. Never when the sin to be confessed was simple innocence. He’d known, then, that Crowley claimed credit for human evils. He’d never seen the proof of what it could cost. The demon’s cheeks had been slicked with tears, his nose had been running, and he hadn’t even seemed to notice the way his corporation had betrayed the depth of his pain. They never talked about that night again, not even since they’d become lovers. Aziraphale didn’t even know if Crowley remembered being found in that state, but he wasn’t willing to bet against it. What passed for brains in these bodies of theirs were terribly good at remembering things that they wished they wouldn’t.

Whatever it was that had happened _this_ time, though, Crowley had come into the shop shaking like an aspen, his eyes hidden behind a bigger pair of glasses than usual but still quite obviously darting around in paranoia. He’d come looking for something that he’d struggled to ask about, picking pointless little arguments about snakes and feathers and aesthetics, seemingly just to have an excuse to bicker. Waving around a _sword,_ of all the silly things, and trying to prod Aziraphale into a sparring match. Aziraphale thought he knew Crowley well enough by now to know when the serpent was looking for a distraction, and… well, Aziraphale had done his best to provide him with one. He’d done his best to give Crowley some pleasure, to give him an outlet for his secret stresses. To give him a quiet, warm spot to nap in after all was done.

There was no way of knowing if it would be _enough,_ not knowing what was wrong in the first place. It almost certainly wouldn’t be enough, he knew, but it was all Aziraphale had to offer. In some ways, Aziraphale felt woefully insufficient—it was just a bit of sex, really, nothing of much value beyond as a temporary diversion. Still, as he looked over his sleeping lover, he saw that Crowley seemed more at ease now. Less tense. His limbs were loose and heavy as he slept, his face slack. His breaths even and slow and deep. Wasn’t that… _something,_ at least?

There were other things Crowley could have turned to for distraction tonight instead, Aziraphale knew. Alcohol was standard for them both for a reason, after all, and Aziraphale kept thinking back on that _sword,_ on Crowley’s swaggering invitation for a fight. No. Maybe what Aziraphale had been able to give him wasn’t _enough,_ but the alternative forms of distraction could be so much more dangerous. So much more like self-destruction.

Aziraphale shifted where he lay, cradling Crowley even nearer to himself. Holding him just a little tighter. The demon’s face was resting on his shoulder, and it might have been a bit of wishful thinking on Aziraphale’s part, but he could have sworn he saw the corners of Crowley’s lips twitch upwards. Could have sworn he saw him smiling in his sleep.

Crowley could have gone anywhere in the world after… whatever it was that had happened. But he didn’t. He’d come _here,_ to Aziraphale’s home. To _Aziraphale._ Not asking for help, because they didn’t _do_ that with one another, but needing it all the same. It was a demonstration of a kind of trust that Aziraphale selfishly craved, selfishly _clung_ to. He hated the thought that Crowley might _need_ help, but reveled in the idea that he might be able to provide it when he did. That Crowley wanted _his_ company, his assistance. That he thought Aziraphale was capable of making things even a little better, instead of expecting him to bumble through and make things worse.

Convinced now that Crowley was unlikely to wake due to some accidental jostling, Aziraphale wrapped an arm up around the demon’s narrow shoulders and began to pet at his hair. Crowley did stir in his sleep at the touch, but seemingly only to stretch and curl tighter against Aziraphale’s chest. A soft breath huffed out from between his lips, along with some kind of quiet vocalization that might have been a word. Aziraphale strained his ears to listen, but Crowley merely flung a bony leg up and over his waist and began to snore. What could Aziraphale do, then, but press a kiss to his dear demon’s forehead? It would have taken more fortitude than he’d been gifted, even as a Principality, to resist such a thing even a second longer.

He was as gentle as he could be with his lips, and before he could think to stop himself, Aziraphale took a deep breath while his lips lingered over his demon’s hairline. This close up, even with the scent of sex hanging in the air in the bedroom, Aziraphale could still make out the hint of infernal power clinging to Crowley’s skin and hair.

It wasn’t _truly_ a smell, really, as much as it was a trace of energy, but with only his human-like senses switched on at the moment, Aziraphale’s corporation processed it with his nose. He’d been smelling it all night since Crowley had arrived, faint but sharp. Acrid and spicy. Lingering. It put to mind the idea of someone carrying the perfume of woodsmoke inside with them after a night spent keeping watch by a campfire. At first, Aziraphale had treated its presence as an explanation of Crowley’s behavior, had excused away his serpent’s eccentricities as exhaustion after expending too many demonic miracles without time to recover. He still suspected that burnout might be _part_ of what this was, but after an evening spent watching Crowley’s tense playacting at normalcy, Aziraphale had other theories.

It had been easy enough to discern—especially once Crowley’s clothes came off—that the scent wasn’t on anything he was wearing as much as it had been soaked into his corporation itself. His skin was covered in it, as was his hair. An even more disturbing discovery was when he noticed that Crowley had put some kind of glamour on himself, too, covering up… something. A marking, perhaps, or part of Crowley’s demonic form he hadn’t been able to shift back for some reason. It was even possible that Crowley had been in a fight tonight—once again, the sword came to mind—so on the off chance the glamour was concealing an injury, Aziraphale had handled his demon with additional caution all night.

Aziraphale had been so very tempted, was _still_ tempted, to look through the glamour and find out the truth. He didn’t, though. It would have been easy, easy as setting his heart to beat or his lungs to breathe. At any point tonight, Aziraphale could have looked over Crowley’s body with his ethereal senses and seen through any illusion the demon tried to project… but he didn’t look. If Crowley went to the trouble of putting a glamour over himself, it meant that there was something he didn’t want people—Aziraphale included—to see. Just like with his eyes, it would feel wrong to look at something of Crowley’s that the demon didn’t want to be seen. Even if Aziraphale never told Crowley that he’d looked, it would feel too much like a violation of his trust.

For all that he could be so very delightfully free and open sometimes, Crowley was notoriously tight-lipped about certain aspects of his life, and Aziraphale assumed the demon had his reasons for that. Aziraphale knew well how much he treasured his own privacy and dignity when those were afforded to him, and he never wanted to be the reason Crowley had to feel the cowering shame of having those things taken from him. He never wanted to make Crowley feel like he was under interrogation, that he had to explain and defend himself. So, at times like this, Aziraphale swallowed his questions down and kept up a calm, supportive face. His job here was to provide distraction and a modicum of rest, and nothing more. He’d just… have to wait for Crowley to be ready to tell him about this on his own, about whatever this was.

If he’d ever be ready.

On any other night, Aziraphale might have had to convince himself not to hope for that kind of thing to happen any time in the next few centuries. But tonight, Crowley had surprised him. He’d set aside a firm barrier that he’d kept in place for seven decades, unprompted and seemingly without any regrets, and Aziraphale was so happy about it he thought he might start to float.

Early on, in those first fumbling experimentations with his human-like body and its pleasures, Aziraphale’s imagination had supplied him with images of his now-lover in fragments. Only ever in pieces, at least at first, as if his conscience were letting him protect himself from the realization that what he truly desired was Crowley in his whole. He knew better now. The clues had always been there, haunting the edges of his memories. Wide, expressive, amber eyes. A flash of red hair. Long fingers that moved with intoxicating cleverness.

Even now, even after knowing one another carnally for seven decades, Aziraphale had made himself be content with the idea that maybe the first of those things might never be a part of their sex life. That Crowley might not ever want Aziraphale to look him in the eyes as they coupled. He made himself accept that thought, terrified as he was of pushing further than was wanted and causing his beloved pain. Just like the glamour he wore tonight, Aziraphale could have looked through Crowley’s sunglasses at any moment in their shared history, could have looked at those beautiful eyes whenever he liked, but he needed it to be Crowley’s choice. He refused to take that from him. As much as he _knew_ that, though, he also couldn’t stop himself from holding onto hope, a hope that tasted sour in his mouth like guilt, that Crowley might someday change his mind.

And then tonight, Crowley had.

How long had Aziraphale been waiting, _hoping,_ for just this exact moment? For Crowley to be comfortable enough—to _trust_ him enough—to take those blasted glasses off and let Aziraphale see his eyes again? The better part of a century, at this point, at least in earnest. Longer, really, longer than they’d been having their trysts, ever since Crowley had become so much more selective about when he let them be seen. Longer than Aziraphale himself had been able to articulate why it was that he wanted so dearly to be able to see them.

Crowley was always giving Aziraphale little gifts, and Aziraphale sometimes wondered if Crowley really understood how much it meant to him to receive them. It was less a matter of what the objects _were_ than it was the idea that Crowley had seen some little thing out in the world and thought of his friend, and had then kept it with him until they met again. It was the idea that he could be handed tangible proof that, even fleetingly, he’d existed in Crowley’s mind while they had been apart.

Aziraphale also wondered if Crowley understood that what he’d done tonight, the trust and vulnerability he’d shown by taking off his glasses, was—out of six thousand years of mementos—the best gift he’d ever given Aziraphale. He just hoped he was a worthy recipient of that kind of generosity.

The sun rose, and still Crowley slept. The light on the wall opposite the window turned first red, then pink, then gold… then grew brighter still, to the familiar hue of daylight. Still, Crowley did not wake. Still, Aziraphale did not wake him. He made excuses and justifications for this, telling himself that surely if Crowley was this deeply asleep, he clearly _needed_ the rest.

His mind moved quickly in those last few hours before their scheduled meeting time, trying to find a way to turn this willful lapse in structure into something advantageous. They could discuss their business with the Arrangement here in bed, whenever it was that Crowley woke. If he slept past the shop’s opening hours, Aziraphale could close it for the day… or leave it open and let Crowley slip out the front door. Surely no one could comment on that. Just one more customer out on the street. And after—after, perhaps, they could get breakfast together. Or dinner.

It was a bit of strange business Aziraphale wanted to propose today, anyway, so a strange setup for their meeting wasn’t _that_ out of order. He and Crowley, he knew, had both been assigned an upcoming job in Stockholm. This was exactly the kind of situation that they’d come up with the Arrangement for in the first place, a situation where one of them could go off and do the work for both and save the other the hassle of travel. They hadn’t gotten to double up in decades, not since—well, since the last time they’d been in Stockholm, really. And goodness, what a trip it had been. This, Aziraphale quietly hoped, might be a repeat performance. He suspected that Crowley was going to offer to take both jobs on himself, and as Aziraphale lay in bed next to him, watching the sleeping demon’s head rise and fall with his own breaths where it lay on his chest, Aziraphale prepared his counterarguments.

_“Why don’t we both go?”_ He said inside his head, feeling his lips mouth along with the words. _“It’s beautiful in the springtime, I’ve heard, and I could do with a bit of time away from customers…”_

The version of Crowley in his imagination was hesitant, wary of both the risk of discovery and of doing anything that felt too demonstrative. Naturally, being a figment of Aziraphale’s imagination, he got straight to questioning the part Aziraphale was the most insecure about.

_“What are you suggesting?”_ He daydreamed that Crowley might ask him, daydreamed that he watched those expressive serpentine eyes narrowing. _“We just… fuck off? Leave London on some kind of… couples’ trip?”_

While that was _exactly_ what Aziraphale was hoping for, at the core of it at least, he planned to keep that to himself. _“Of course not. But time spent travelling_ could _be diverting, and we could take the proper precautions. Leave separately, run into each other there by chance… just like the old days…”_

By eight in the morning, an hour before their meeting, Aziraphale thought he finally had the conversation planned out and was prepared to spend the rest of the day in bed basking in Crowley’s presence. Naturally, though, that was exactly when Crowley woke up.

His first and only warning was Crowley tensing up against him. Twitching slightly. He made some quiet noise deep in his throat, a soft, ragged little moan. Aziraphale put a hand on his shoulder to soothe him, and that was all it took. He found himself looking into a pair of frantic eyes, yellow gold from corner to corner, and then Crowley was flinging himself out of the bed. The demon backed up as far as he could in the cramped bedroom, naked and tense, until he knocked the backs of his knees against Aziraphale’s armchair. Crowley winced, baring sharp teeth, and looked between the door and the window like he was calculating the best escape route.

Whatever half-sleeping panic had come over him passed quickly, before Aziraphale was even halfway out of bed himself to try to meet him.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, his voice croaky with sleep. Aziraphale nodded, and was pleased to see that almost all of the tension drained from the demon’s posture at the sight… until his eyes flicked back up to the window, to the sunlight streaming inside. “What time is it?”

“Eight—”

_“Eight?”_ Crowley repeated, then hissed a long string of expletives as he rushed to the chest at the foot of the bed and started throwing on his clothes. “Sorry, sssssorry, fuck. Didn’t—didn’t mean to sleep…”

“No harm was done,” Aziraphale said, frowning. “And you did look so tired.”

“Fuck. _Fuck…”_

He watched, helpless, as Crowley reassembled his outfit from earlier in the night. Buttoned himself up nearly to his chin, tied his cravat tight and stiff. Shoved his boots on over feet that were no longer shaped to accommodate them. Pushed his glasses back on over his eyes. His clothes were, frankly, a bit of a disaster, but Crowley straightened everything to exacting precision with a wave of his hand. Another whiff of infernal magic crept through the air and prickled at Aziraphale’s nose.

“An hour, yeah?” Crowley asked him, breathless, his hand on the door. “The park?”

“Yes, but—”

Aziraphale reached for him, confused, and to his relief, Crowley came to him. Let him kiss him once on the lips. Let him whisper in his ear and bid him a soft, _“Mind how you go.”_

And then the demon was gone. Aziraphale heard the clatter of his footsteps down the spiral staircase, heard him bustling around downstairs as he looked for his hat and walking stick. Heard the back door shut behind him. Felt him slip through the gap in the wards, left open for him and him only.

Alone in bed, still very naked and confused, Aziraphale blinked. He hoped Crowley was planning to get around to his next bit of emotional honesty quickly, because he had no earthly idea what any of that had been about.  


* * *

By the time Crowley got out of the alleyway behind the shop, the early morning sun was already starting to burn away the fog from the night before. He checked his surroundings multiple times as he fled the area, terrified that someone had followed him here, or would be waiting just outside. _Anyone_ could have snuck up on him—on _them_ —while Crowley had been unconscious for… for what? Four hours, maybe five. He’d let himself get too comfortable, too relaxed, and he felt the terror of what _could have happened_ prickling at his skin like an emerging chemical burn.

The rule he’d just broken, the one about not staying with Aziraphale past dawn, was a rule he’d come up with only _partially_ to help keep him from becoming a nuisance to the angel. Well, from becoming the kind of nuisance he didn’t want to invite back. The other, bigger reason was that they needed to be smart about when and how they were spending time together.

If they happened to meet somewhere in public—as they would in about forty minutes, Crowley saw upon checking his snake-patterned pocket watch—and were spotted together, they had a pretext. Built-in plausible deniability. It was a chance meeting and they happened to be in the same place at the same time. Nothing suspicious there. Crowley could probably even spin a visit during business hours as a reconnaissance trip to check on the opposition, could say he’d been pretending to be a customer and had slipped in under the resident angel’s nose. Nighttime visits were risky, but the shop was well-warded, and the cover of darkness provided Crowley with a way to sneak out unnoticed.

He couldn’t just… just fucking _move in_ to Aziraphale’s shop, though. Not if he didn’t want them to get caught. And _especially_ not if he was going to be passing out, leaving himself unable to do anything if something happened. He needed to be alert, needed to be ready to hide himself or run if someone came knocking. To be ready to fight, he reminded himself, his leather gloves creaking as he tensed his hold on the head of his walking stick. But only as a last resort. Only if they found themselves backed into a corner.

It was too close to their meeting time to go back to his lodgings, but too far away from it to go lurk in St. James Park for the rest of the time. Instead, Crowley just… paced around Soho. He paced and he thought. Panicked, too, but that was to be expected. It was practically his default state at this point.

If it were Heaven who caught them, Aziraphale’s people instead of Crowley's, he figured that they had at least a ghost of a chance. Assuming they were together when they were caught— _and, let’s face it,_ Crowley thought, _that’s probably when it would happen_ —and assuming their opening move wasn’t to smite Crowley from the stratosphere, Crowley at least had a way of fighting back. It took a lot from a demon to summon Hellfire all the way up to Earth, and the cost went up the more of it you wanted. That was why most demons who wanted to burn things topside stuck with regular fire unless they were able to plan ahead and bring some of the heavy-duty stuff up to the surface with them.

Angels as a species were particularly flammable, but even still, he’d have his work cut out for him. Crowley couldn’t see a fight against all of Heaven ending well for him, so conservation of power and energy wouldn’t be a problem he’d need to consider. He’d summon as much of it as he could and spit fire at any angel who dared try to touch Aziraphale. Best case scenario, Crowley would end up burning himself up, discorporate before Heaven could destroy him permanently, and shoot to the front of the line for a replacement body once Dagon heard he’d lost his old one burning half a dozen angels into nothingness. Worst case scenario... well, that was them getting to Aziraphale first, wasn’t it? The most likely option, he suspected, was that he’d be outnumbered but able to buy Aziraphale enough time to fucking _run._

Of course, all of that only mattered if it were Heaven who caught them. If it was Hell...

Well, if it were Hell, there was fuck all they could do.

Demons were reasonably fireproof, but a corporation—angelic or demonic—was still a physical object. Hellfire could still burn a demon’s body past its ability to support life, just like regular fire could, assuming you held one of them in it long enough and they didn’t think to try to redirect it. Crowley assumed it worked the same way for angels. If you caught one in humanoid form and poured Holy Water straight into their lungs, and they didn’t miracle it out or remember that they didn’t need to breathe, they’d probably drown just the same as they would if you tied rocks to their legs and cast them into the sea.

Problem was, it wasn’t permanent. It would just result in discorporation. Any demon who survived being attacked by one of their own would just go straight down to Hell and tell everyone to quit bothering with the humans for a while and go scour every corner of the universe for a Serpent gone rogue and the angel he would probably be stupid enough to drag along with him when he went on the run. Anything Crowley could think of to do would be a delaying tactic at best.

No, there were no permanent solutions for Hell. No way to make sure that any potential demonic witnesses stayed quiet. They didn’t have even a ghost of a chance if Hell were the ones who found them out.

...Unless.

_Unless…_

The gears inside Crowley’s mind started to turn faster, faster than he could stop them.

It was perfect, wasn’t it? A parallel, a bargain. Another layer to their Arrangement. It fit in well with the rest of their dynamic. Stay out of each other’s way, lend a hand when needed. Have as many blissful bloody assignations as they thought they could get away with. Keep one another’s secrets. Call each other _lover_ when there was no one around to hear.

…Offer one another the means to protect themselves from their sides.

Means no one else could provide but the pair of them. For the first time in Crowley’s long memory, he found himself vaguely grateful that he was a demon and Aziraphale was an angel. This scheme would never work if Crowley were an angel still, or if (Satan forbid) Aziraphale had Fallen and they were both demons. The only way for the two of them be safe from both Heaven _and_ Hell would be to use their own sides’ tools against them. The Holy and the Unholy. Fire and water.

It seemed so perfect, somehow, like this was meant to be. Symmetrical. Like all the pieces had lined up and fallen into place, and at last, Crowley saw before him a picture of real, genuine freedom. The means to protect themselves, to protect his angel, and it had been in his reach all these centuries. All they needed to do was work together to claim it. It felt...

He couldn’t even think the word without grimacing, but Crowley couldn’t deny that this whole setup positively reeked of fucking _ineffability._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Trauma: A Discussion.**  
>  (Also known as the part where I point at one of the big themes in this series and yammer about it for an additional 1k words after you just read 10k other words of chapter.)  
> Knowing one’s own boundaries and enforcing them are really important in any relationship, but particularly in relationships where one person is carrying around trauma (or if both of them are, as is the case of this story). Having trauma can also make it a _lot_ harder to do those things, and sometimes it can contribute to dysfunction and unhealthiness in a relationship. In this story, A&C have both grown a lot over their history together, but they’re still employed by their sides and are still constantly getting re-traumatized. No one would really be able to _heal_ in a situation like that, and they don’t see a way out yet.
> 
> However! I’m not going to climb up on some moral soap box and act like them getting together and fuckin’ like rabbits for 7 decades was a _mistake_ for them, even though what’s coming up next for them at St. James’ Park is going to be difficult, as will the next 150-something years before they can tell Heaven and Hell to fuck off and leave them be. The trope of them waiting to get together after the Apocalypse when they’re free so they can heal together is a really awesome version of the story, and one I love reading in fic, and love writing sometimes… but it’s not the story I wanted to tell _here._ I wanted this to be a story about a relationship between two traumatized people that’s loving and complicated and dangerous, one where they provide support and companionship and space for healing for each other, but one that is also somewhat unhealthy and sometimes hurtful.  
> One of my favorite tropes in fic is about damaged people loving each other—not being “healed by love” or whatever, but just being allowed to love and be loved exactly where they are in their lives. Not for who they were before they got hurt, or for a hypothetical version of them in the future who might be “cured,” but for exactly who they _are,_ even with the burden of trauma still on their shoulders.
> 
> There’s a lot of talk I’ve encountered in mental health spaces on social media about how traumatized people _owe it to their partners to Get Better_ and _shouldn’t dump their baggage on another person,_ and in some ways, that’s fair. It’s no one’s job to _fix you,_ except your own, and no one really even can “fix” another person, I don’t think. Sometimes people just _shouldn’t_ be in a relationship at a particular moment because their mental health just isn’t there yet, and that’s a choice they have to make on an individual basis.  
> ...But there’s a huge difference between someone owning their own damage and making choices for their recovery & that kind of no-nuance, hot take-y message that can sound an awful lot like, _“You’re too broken to be worth loving right now.”_ The second thing fucking sucks.  
> It matters to me, the idea that people who are hurt be allowed to love and be loved. That’s what I’ve tried to write here. I wanted these characters to make the decision to take a risk and try to be happy in the moment, even if the situation they’re in is awful, and even if they can’t have the kind of relationship they actually want. They’ve tried to meet each other—and themselves—where they are, because they have no way of knowing if there’s a future for them where they’ll get a happy ending. Or even just an ending where they survive.
> 
> ... and sometimes that choice results in some ups and downs. If you’re looking to dodge relationship angst in particular (specifically, the first half of the “breaking up and making up” tag) until there’s a resolution to it, I’d advise you wait to read chapter 22 until chapter 23 is up, which _should_ be when the fic is 100% finished.  
> Chapter 22 will be a speedrun through like 80 years of these two not talking very much in the aftermath of the St. James’ Park fight. Then, in chapter 23, we blow up a church. Hard Times indeed.  
> If my chapter estimate is wrong again, I’ll own my fuckup in the top of the next AN, lmao. ALSO…
> 
> ... holy FUCK this fic is almost over. The series isn’t, because I still have one more before it’s over-over, but wow. I started outlining Gentle Night in the last few months of 20 _19_ , so seeing it end is going to be _weird._  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Next chapter will be up **Thursday, February 25th.** I’ll see you all then, and in the meantime, stay safe. Mind how you go.


	22. Optimism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There were traces of _him_ everywhere he looked, in every book in Aziraphale’s quite extensive collection. Many were literal traces of him, places where Aziraphale could look between the words to see where the demon’s hands had worked—there, that one arguing about Eden and that first original sin, and beside it, one arguing about the pull of gravity holding in sway the planets and stars. The sound of his laughter was pressed like a wildflower between the pages of human treatises on misconception, preserved for eternity.
> 
>  _“Do you remember, angel?”_ The memory was almost like a voice in his ear, so clear that he almost turned back to look towards the empty settee on reflex. _“Do you remember when they thought the sun revolved around the Earth?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I refuse to apologize for this chapter’s length lmao, mostly because I'm really proud of writing and editing 20k during a natural disaster. I figured I could either drop it in one huge chunk like this, or up the chapter count _again_ , and I did not want to do that to you or to myself. So… Settle in. Get comfortable. Make sure you have snacks or something nearby. Hydrate. This is one big avocado.
> 
> Crowley’s dubiously canonical (for TV-verse, least) century-long nap is inconvenient for me, so I have chosen to ignore it. He’s sleeping a lot here still, but it’s more fragmented.
> 
> ### Content Notes:
> 
> They’re separated/broken up for this whole chapter, though they still care for one another. Just letting you know that up front in case you want to wait for next chapter and its resolution before reading 20k of pining and relationship angst.  
> Reference to how Crowley got some of his injuries from Hell—specifically, that he got kicked in the ribs. Brief and not super graphic.  
> Discussion of suicide, specifically as it pertains to Aziraphale trying to understand Crowley’s choice to ask for Holy Water—in slightly more detail than is shown in the show because he’s caught in a worry spiral.  
> Heavy drinking that’s mostly referenced rather than shown.  
> Plant abuse and death.  
> Heaven & Hell being absolute assholes.  
> Very mild injury/blood.  
> Touch starvation & alienation from one’s own body.  
> Brief mention of historical homophobia as it relates to the secrecy of the Hundred Guineas Club, including that some of those people had family members who suck.  
> Minor/background character death.  
> Discussion of potential Aziraphale/others and Crowley/others, though nothing really happens in either instance.
> 
>   * Aziraphale’s situation happens while he is a member of the Hundred Guineas Club where he finds that he enjoys casual intimacy from the humans, including non-romantic (for him) kissing during the gavotte. He takes up one human on his offer of a more romantic kiss so he could try it, but realizes it’s not what he’s interested in. 
>   * Crowley’s situation comes at the behest of Hell. It’s coercive, but he’s able to dodge what’s asked of him by finding humans willing to fuck one another instead of him… ft. some light memory modification so he doesn’t get in trouble for bending the rules.
> 

> 
>   
> Also, bonus CW for the mental health essay I wrote y’all in the end note. Unlike last chapter, that one _is_ personal, but it’s also pretty vague on all the details. Skip if you need to, but my friend _did_ draw me some art that’s linked there.
> 
> Chapter specific sex acts: masturbation and anal… _well, it’s not anal -~fingering~ if it’s a snake tail, so I guess…_ anal sex with one’s own snake tail?  
> There is one (1) sex scene in this, and it’s a very monsterfucker-flavored bit of self-care on Crowley’s part. He has a penis in that scene. Aziraphale’s genitals are never shown on-page, but I will tell you that what he has in his pants is sadness.  
> In addition, there’s some off-page fucking happening between incidental human characters.

The bookshop’s front door shut behind Aziraphale with something uncomfortably like finality. There were no humans in the shop, of course. Aziraphale hadn’t bothered to open for business before leaving for St. James’ Park, as he’d been fully expecting to come home after with—

Well. He hadn’t been expecting _that._

His shop seemed to sense his agitation and it reacted without his conscious thought, sending the curtains hurtling shut and locking the door behind him with both mortal and magical means, sealing the wards around him so that no one could follow him.

No one besides one very _specific_ being.

The shop had left open the usual gap in the wards, like it always did, for Crowley. Aziraphale just didn’t know why, exactly, it did it this time. He hadn’t asked it to. He didn’t know if the shop was manifesting some sort of will of its own, if it was acting out of some desire of its own. Perhaps it was merely reacting to Aziraphale’s residual expectation that the demon would come clattering in through the back door at any moment, all tense-coiled fiery anger, ready to continue their argument. Perhaps Aziraphale only expected that because it was what he quietly wanted to happen.

There was a terrible thought in the back of his mind, buried beneath all his rapidly deflating anger and growing harder to ignore by the moment, that told him that Crowley _wouldn’t_ be back. They had quarreled before, certainly, but something about today felt… felt so dreadfully different. Felt like a deep crack had opened up in something he’d tricked himself into thinking was unassailable.

A foolish thing to believe, of course. To _let_ himself believe. They were… they were opposites. The schism between them had existed for far longer than their—their alignment, however satisfying it had felt in the moment. Their quarrel today, no matter how disturbing, was nothing more significant than an unpleasant reminder of the way things had to be. A reset, however jarring, from this illusion that Aziraphale had let himself believe in. That he could be allowed to play _house_ with a demon, that he could afford to drop his guard.

During his walk home from the park, Aziraphale had replayed the argument again and again in his mind, offering witty retorts to an imaginary Crowley that he had been too flustered to tell the real one. The phrase, _“Just what the_ Hell _do you think you’re playing at, here?”_ featured prominently in this mental rant. However, once he was back inside his home, once he was back somewhere _silent,_ his arguments began to sound so very small. Petulant. Powerless. Quieter even than the sound of his own boots on the bookshop floors as Aziraphale paced them. Each footstep was _deafening,_ now, like a footstep taken in a cave. When had it gotten so quiet in here? So empty?

When was the last time he’d been alone in the shop and actually felt like he was truly _alone?_

He made himself stop pacing, made himself stop worrying at the velvet of his waistcoat—a terrible habit, really, one that destroyed his clothing and made him look shabby and _communicated his internal weakness and indecisiveness._ Aziraphale had gotten that note on performance reviews more than once before. It was time he took it to heart.

Besides, worrying was pointless. It didn’t matter at the moment _why_ Crowley had asked him such a thing. The fact that he had _asked_ meant that he didn’t have the ability to access Holy Water on his own. Surely if he had some other source for it, Crowley wouldn’t have bothered letting Aziraphale in on his plan. So, for the moment, Crowley was safe. He was safe and—and, well… Surely, he’d be back. Wouldn’t he? Yes. Of course he would. He’d _have_ to be. He’d be back to try this argument again, and Aziraphale would be ready the next time. Ready to hear Crowley’s explanation and talk him out of whatever foolish scheme this was that he’d concocted.

Right. He had a plan, and all he had to do was wait for Crowley to cool his head, and then they could fix this. Talk again, and fix this.

In the present moment, though, Aziraphale needed to occupy himself. He needed _work._ Aziraphale went on a hunt of the whole shop, searching out his most battered, hopeless, damaged books, the ones that he’d been needing to get around to fixing. He assembled a stack of the worst of them, the ones that had been given over to him as _ruined,_ on the table in his back room. Positioned himself where he could see both the front door and the back—and Heaven help him, where he was in sight of the skylight, too—and made himself work.

It was good work. Necessary work. Work he was _good at._ If Aziraphale kept his hands and his eyes and his mind busy, then _surely_ that would keep him too busy to fret over something that only time could smooth over. He could do it slowly, the human way, with minimal miracles. The noise of his tools on the leather, on the water-damaged pages, would fill the quiet between the stacks, and when he was done, he would have something beautiful to show for his labors. When he was done, he would be in a position to see this situation more clearly. The work would calm him, let him distance himself from his emotions and come back to this problem with a level head. He would be able fix this like he fixed his books, and all would be well again.  


* * *

“Fraternizing. _Fraternizing!_ A quick fumble in the dark, that could be called fraternizing. A drunk shag, sure. This... this was seventy years of—of intention.” Crowley leaned on the doorframe, punching out each syllable of his current least favorite four-syllable word in an effort to make himself heard through both his slurring and the occasional hiss. He found himself waving a hand around as he tried to count out the years. His other hand maintained its loose grasp on the neck of his bottle. “Or maybe just ssssssssixy-nine. Dunno if he coun’sSstockholm, or just Paris.”

Predictably, the plants in his conservatory didn’t answer him. Not in words, anyway. Not in any way that cleared any of this _up_ for him, not even the bloody math of it. They just stood there, leaves slowly swaying in the stagnant air, scattering sunlight on the floor.

“But m’point is. It was… This was seven fucking _decades_ of... of a relationship!” His voice cracked on him, hard, and he forced down another drink to try to make up for it. It _had_ been, though. He was sure of it. Maybe not one based on mutual romantic love, but mutual sexual attraction at the very least. “Seventy years, and it’s _fraternizing_ now? Last night it was—last night. Last night… thas’not what he called it.”

Last night it had been _“lovers,”_ a word he’d only just been given to use and was now already having to try to forget. He was having a hard time adjusting to the thought that all of that had just been… what? An affectation? Had it really been just a simple descriptor with no deeper meaning?

It felt ridiculous, being a nearly six-thousand year old demon and having a tantrum about one _single word._ Crowley knew, though, as much as he was trying to drown that thought, that it was about more than just the word.

Part of it was that… well. That it had been _seventy years._ He’d thought he understood Aziraphale pretty well by now, thought he could anticipate his patterns. His moods. He’d had six millennia before this to build up his knowledge base and seventy years of the affair to hone it into a polished skill. He thought he understood their careful little dance of push and pull, of stepping forward and stepping back. Today, though, Crowley had pushed when he shouldn’t have, had stepped forward when he should have waited, and had trampled right over one of Aziraphale’s millions of invisible, unspoken, bloody _lines._

Seventy years was longer than most human couples could hope to have. How the _fuck_ did humans figure one another out in such a short amount of time?

…But they weren’t a couple. And they weren’t human. Seventy years was still short in the face of nearly six thousand. They'd been the best years of Crowley’s life, but he supposed he should expect that it had all been just a dalliance to Aziraphale. That it was just _fraternizing._

“He callsss _everyone_ m’dear, too,” Crowley said, pointing aggressively at a plant in the corner. “Should’a known. Should’a _fucking_ seen it coming.”

He’d understood the shape of what they had, once. At some point, though, he’d stopped reminding himself that this was all physical for the angel and fooled himself into believing it might have been more.

But even then, they were still friends, right? Sure, _yes,_ he had deliberately concealed some of the gory details from the angel and _may_ have spent a few millennia downplaying the stakes of his employment with Hell. He never put any blame on Aziraphale for not immediately gathering how serious a question it was that Crowley had asked him. Aziraphale _knew_ him, though, didn’t he? Knew that Crowley wasn’t the sort of demon to ask for something like that for some… for some _frivolous_ reason, right?

A certain amount of Crowley’s rational brain had known to expect that Aziraphale would need a little more persuasion before agreeing to something as serious as bending his side’s rules and handing over Holy Water to a demon. He’d known, on some level, to expect the angel would need a little more time. How long had it taken him to agree to the Arrangement, after all? But this time felt… different than that. Sharper, more dire. More final. Something about what he’d asked, or maybe just the _way_ he’d asked, seemed to push something in the angel far past its breaking point. Something Crowley hadn’t known had been there to be broken. And now, he… he didn’t quite know what to do.

Crowley was a damned creature who had Fallen from Heaven into a lake of boiling sulfur, only to crawl out, preen his ruined wings, and set about making a name for himself. He walked into Hell on a regular basis, surviving whatever was waiting for him there, never letting them see his fear, and emerged with his head held high every time. He had seen humanity at its worst, seen the cruelties that could make the machinations of Hell seem like a kindness, and could still smile at the humans when he saw what else they could be, when he got to see them at their cleverest. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he was built for resilience, as that would imply that She had a hand in his ability to get back up again after being kicked down, but it was definitely a learned skill he’d gotten pretty damned good at over the millennia.

Rationally, he knew he’d survived worse and come back stronger for it, but he couldn’t shake the fear that if this went wrong—if he fucked it up for good, lost Aziraphale’s companionship forever—something would break inside himself that he couldn’t fix.

By this time of late morning, Crowley found himself squinting at the brightness of the light, something ancient and aching inside him telling him to burrow away somewhere dark and tight and safe and wait out the worst of this. To sleep through the worst of this. He was still so, _so_ fucking tired. He never really slept last night after—after getting back from Hell. Not a full night. Only a handful of hours.

All spent held in the angel’s arms.

He wanted to sleep—no, he _needed_ to sleep. Needed to let himself recover from his heavy miracle usage last night, needed let the last of his lingering injuries heal the human way so he could finally turn his bloody glamour off. He _wanted_ to stop thinking about this morning before his day-drinking made him take a tailspin out of anger and frustration into something much more pathetic. He _wanted_ to go unconscious for as long as his body would let him.

But he had all these fucking _plants_ to think about first. There were options, he supposed, to make sure they didn’t die while he was asleep. They were too fussy to be kept in a storage void, and he didn’t want to burn another miracle to provide each one an infinite amount of water on their own individual schedules. The simplest thing would be to hire some human to look after them… but he didn’t know how long he’d be napping, and a human might start to ask questions if they were asked to look after plants in an abandoned house for several years with no contact from their employer. Besides, he didn’t really like the idea of someone else creeping around his lodgings while he was asleep…

Crowley looked around the conservatory, at the garden he had made here these last twenty years he’d had this ridiculous townhouse in Regent’s Park. The plants had grown tall here in that time, lush and green. His own private jungle, and at the center, an empty table and two chairs stood as a monument to his inability to keep his stupid optimism in check. Here, the sunlight streamed in through the windows, dappling the floor with patches of green-filtered light, sickly and headache-inducing as the leaves swayed above. In between the towering, looming plants were heavy, black shadows. Anything could be hiding in shadows like that. At the same time, Crowley felt like he himself had no place he could hide here. Floor to ceiling windows left him feeling entirely too exposed. Anyone could see him through those windows, and he would never know.

Satan, but the light in here was terrible. He’d been an idiot to ever think it was good for trying to grow plants in here. East facing windows had been a mistake. There was ample light in the mornings, sure, but by evening the sun always abandoned the plants to languish in the dark. In the summer, the light was too harsh, too hot, burning the tender leaves when it first fell on them at dawn.

Nothing could thrive here, nothing natural at least. If Crowley weren’t here to encourage them to grow bigger and greener… if the power of his demonic expectation weren’t pushing them harder, if he wasn’t protecting them, they’d have all withered here. Their success was artificial.

“Right,” Crowley barked, pushing himself up off the doorframe. He drained the rest of his bottle and let it slip from his grip. The clatter of empty glass on the tile floor was loud as it rolled away, but somehow, it did not break. “You’ve had it so easssssy all this time. No more. You’re on your own.”

A few of the leaves waved at him, confused, as he backed up down his hallway—only knocking into a few pieces of artful clutter. Nothing broke, though it didn’t really matter. He planned on abandoning most of this junk the very next opportunity he got to move somewhere else.

Crowley spared one last glance at the two chairs in the center of the conservatory, empty as they always were and always would be, then turned on his heel and stalked off in the direction of his bedroom. “Let this be a lesssssson. You can’t just count on other people to give you what you need,” he snarled over his shoulder. “I’ll survive it. Let’s sssssssee how you lot do.”

Once he’d made it inside his bedroom, Crowley slammed all the drapes shut, peeled off every stitch of his clothing save for his socks, and crawled into bed. He tossed his glasses off across the room hard enough to crack the glass, though he didn’t get up again to check to see if he actually had done so.

His throat and eyes began to burn, remembering how happy he’d felt only just a few hours earlier. Remembering how it had felt to rest his bare face against Aziraphale’s skin. Remembering how it had felt the first time he got to hear the word _“lovers”_ tumble out of those perfect, pink lips.

A part of his mind, scattered as it was, recognized that this was not _cruelty_ on Aziraphale’s part, at least not a _deliberate_ cruelty. He remembered, even in his own terror, that the angel was every bit as scared as he was himself. More, probably. Hell could hurt Crowley, but they hadn’t been able to make him fully buy the party line they were trying to sell him. Aziraphale still had Heaven whispering in his ears, tearing him down and twisting everything he believed. Making him doubt himself and live in fear of slipping up. After all, Aziraphale could still _Fall._ There was some level of comfort, Crowley thought, in already having hit the ground.

The only things Hell could really do were hurt him, kill him, or hurt Aziraphale. He didn’t want to be hurt again, but he was used to it by now. He didn’t want to be killed, but he supposed if they did go through with it, they wouldn’t be able to do anything else to him. And as for hurting Aziraphale… Crowley wouldn’t let that happen. His Holy Water plan, disastrous as this first run at getting his hands on it had been, _was_ a good plan. He’d try again later, after the angel had gotten a chance to cool off.

If he was willing to talk to Crowley again after this.

His eyes landed on his most recent orders from Hell, tucked up inside a neat little envelope on his desk. He was supposed to be discussing the details of his next mission with Aziraphale right about now, not sulking in bed… or, perhaps he was supposed to be in a different bed, busy vigorously celebrating the decision over which of them would be taking the jaunt over to Stockholm for the both of them. That conversation hadn’t happened, though, and Crowley was still on the hook for the Stockholm job.

There was no way in Hell—or Heaven, or on Earth, or anywhere in space—that Crowley would be going to Stockholm. Freezing his balls off in the city where Aziraphale fucked him for the first time? No thanks. Crowley needed that emotional boot to the gut about as much as he needed an actual boot to the gut. Not that Hell cared _at all_ what Crowley needed. The distinctly boot-shaped bruises on his ribs, by now probably to the nasty green-yellow stage of healing beneath his glamour, were proof of that.

If he woke up in time, he’d forge the Stockholm paperwork and send it in. Take the risk that they’d catch him in a lie. Crowley was used to taking risks. And if he overslept… Well. If they wanted him out of this bed that badly, they would be free to drag him out of it. He’d survived reprimands before. He’d survive whatever they decided to do to him for this. It would be worth it just to not be awake right now.

Having decided that all of that mess was a problem for future-Crowley, present-moment-Crowley closed his eyes, tugged the blankets up to his chin, and put himself into a deep, deep sleep.  


* * *

Given his advanced state of agitation, Aziraphale thought it should be considered admirable that he held out from looking for Crowley for nearly a full day. He looked with his ethereal senses and could have wept in relief upon feeling the familiar resonance of Crowley’s form. The demon was alive—though, rationally, Aziraphale knew that he had no reason _not_ to be. After all, Aziraphale _had_ told him no. Even better, he was close by. In London, still, in fact. For a few weeks, that gave Aziraphale enough peace of mind that he was able to stay put and wait for Crowley to calm down and drop by again. It soothed him enough that he was able to concentrate on keeping himself busy and useful fixing his books.

An angel can fix a lot of books in six months.

He can fix even more if he doesn’t open his shop during that time. Or leave it. Or sleep. His human neighbors probably thought that Mr. A. Fell, the proprietor of this establishment, was dead. A few of them, some of the locals Aziraphale had gotten friendly with in his time had come knocking, but he’d not answered them. The bookshop, dear thing, had politely turned them all away by nudging the wards around itself like a horse twitches to shoo off a fly, and they had all been reminded of urgent business elsewhere.

In those six months, Aziraphale saw no sign of the Serpent of Eden, except in those moments of weakness when he let himself open his millions of eyes and _Look._ In those moments of weakness, he was reminded that Crowley was still alive, still in London… just, choosing to keep his distance. Choosing to stay away. As much as that ached, Aziraphale refused to be the one to break that silence first. Not after the madness Crowley had spouted in the park. He didn’t want to encourage that kind of thinking.

Unfortunately, instead of giving him a distraction from his thoughts, the work of book repair had left Aziraphale’s mind free to follow his worries down whatever paths they decided to take him. He’d had six months of uninterrupted alone time to fret, and in that time, he’d come to the conclusion that Crowley was so reckless as to be infuriating.

It wasn’t new information, not really. Of the two of them, Crowley was always the biggest risk taker. It was to be expected, probably. After all, he _was_ a demon. This was someone who had tried signing up with Lucifer and his band of rebels for a shot at something somehow _better_ than Heaven. And so, of course, he was likely somewhat used to carrying on with insane schemes and very high-risk gambits.

He’d been sleeping with an _angel_ for seven decades, after all. There was no doubt that Crowley was something of a daredevil, and perhaps a fool to boot. Aziraphale could have gotten him killed at any point, so why was he working himself up into a fit that Crowley had asked him for the right to hold that destructive power in his own hands?

Six months ago, Crowley had asked him for Holy Water. He’d asked him for the one substance in Heaven, Hell, and Earth combined that could kill a demon—not discorporate one, not _hurt_ one, but kill one. Wipe their very existence from reality with no way to bring them back.

_Why?_

Well, to destroy a demon. Obviously. But was it supposed to be used against some… some other demon, someone with whom Crowley had quarreled, or was it… was it intended to be used on Crowley himself? He’d called it _insurance…_ but insurance for _what?_ Aziraphale couldn’t imagine any other circumstance where he’d need a weapon like that unless he was planning to use it as a suicide pill, a last resort for if it seemed as though they were close to discovery. A way to not so much _avoid_ repercussions as much as it was a way to hasten them. To rush straight through to the end, to—to whatever happened to a demon after death.

Aziraphale didn’t even know if there _was_ such a thing as an afterlife for angels, or for those of angelic stock. How strange it felt, questioning a thing that was treated as such a fundamental tenant in most human religions: the idea that the end might not be _final._

Somehow, he felt that it probably was. At least for beings such as himself and Crowley. Holy Water—and its hellish counterpart—were supposed to be raw destructive force in a tiny package. They were weapons of war, and, as Gabriel and Sandalphon kept reminding him, they would be what decided the victors of the _last_ War. He doubted that Heaven and Hell would pick weapons for the End Times if they weren’t sure they were permanent.

They had been extensively tested, after all. Probably. Aziraphale knew the number of angels that had been created in the Beginning, prior to the invention of both such things. He also knew that the combined armies of Heaven and Hell, when they finally met for battle on the fields of Megiddo, wouldn’t _quite_ match that total number. It was a bit of arithmetic he didn’t like to spend too much time pondering, though it was hard not to notice the gap in the sum. Not to notice the fact that there were a few on both sides who weren’t there anymore.

That was part of why Aziraphale so profoundly feared the idea of getting caught. It wasn’t that he _didn’t_ fear Falling… just that he assumed that if Falling is what She had planned for him, She would have cast him out by now. Seventy years ago, maybe, after that first night in Stockholm… or perhaps five thousand eight hundred and sixty-six years ago, after his lie to Her in the shadow of the wall of Eden.

Even still, he had this horrible nagging paranoia that one day he would make the wrong step, say something to incriminate them both, and then he would disappear. Heaven didn’t have Hellfire, he knew, but they had Holy Water in abundance. Maybe _they_ could make him Fall, just so the stain of him could be washed off their records. The worst part of that scenario was that he wouldn’t even be able to find out if Hell knew, or what it had done with Crowley.

They both knew what was at stake with their Arrangement. Aziraphale couldn’t understand what could have possibly compelled Crowley to want to take such drastic measures that could end up destroying his life.

In his most frightened moments, of course, Aziraphale contemplated the idea that Crowley might have wanted that exact outcome. He replayed their last night together in his mind with perfect, angelic recall, and from certain angles, Crowley’s erratic behavior seemed to make sense if one looked at it like a goodbye. He’d shed the last of his boundaries, had shown Aziraphale his eyes that he’d kept hidden for _seventy_ years… had that been an attempt at giving Aziraphale one last gift before he left his life for good? Had that night been the night Crowley made up his mind to die?

It was only the certainty that Crowley _was_ alive, that he _didn’t_ have access to Holy Water, that allowed Aziraphale to stay in the bookshop to try to give Crowley the space that he so clearly wanted. Given his advanced state of agitation, however, Aziraphale thought it should be considered admirable that he held out from trying to seek Crowley out for six months. In the end, the thing that pushed him to act was the deadline looming above him.

They were both supposed to be in Stockholm by now. He’d arranged for passage on a ship three months ago via miracle but never boarded it—a tacit lie, but one that allowed him to stay in his bookshop and keep watch. Crowley, he knew, was supposed to be there by now, too, but he was _still_ in London. He hadn’t seemed to have moved in _six months,_ in fact, and that alone was deeply troubling. Very soon, too, they would be both reaching the _end_ of their assignment windows, and their sides would be expecting their reports.

So, Aziraphale left his shop, justifying it to himself by acknowledging that if he waited too long, he wouldn’t be able to travel to Sweden the human way in time to get his work done. As it was, he was betting a lot on the idea that he would be able to get his job—maybe even his _and_ Crowley’s jobs—done in only a few weeks.

That’s how he found himself dithering at the end of the walkway leading up to a stylish townhouse in Regent’s Park. Aziraphale had never been to this place before, but he’d followed his senses here, and knew that Crowley was somewhere inside it.

There were spells woven in a circle around the property, wards and illusions to conceal the building and its occupant from notice. Aziraphale didn’t know how long Crowley had owned this little place, but he could tell that he’d been putting in the work to hide it for decades at least. It felt younger than the bookshop, but not by that long. The spells definitely seemed like they had been built up in layers over time. It was curious, Aziraphale thought, that he’d been able to track Crowley’s hideout down at all, given that the demon had put such heavy protections in place.

Then, he stepped across the barrier, and he _felt_ it. Felt the tight weave of the spellwork part for him, the infernal power never touching his body even as it let him inside his demon’s sanctum. Aziraphale blinked hard, his too-human eyes burning.

He stood outside the doorway for longer than was courteous, at first only knocking—he wasn’t an _animal_ —and then trying his luck calling out to the demon tucked away inside, carefully moderating his volume in case any of Crowley’s neighbors were listening. There was no answer, and Aziraphale supposed he couldn’t blame Crowley for ignoring him. He would have left it at that, but he was due to leave for Stockholm in the morning and wanted to get the information on Crowley’s duties before he left. He also wanted to take a few moments and talk about what had happened during their last meeting… if Crowley would let him.

Aziraphale waited on the step for an hour. He might have given up sooner if he hadn’t been able to _feel_ the shape of Crowley so clearly inside… not moving. Perfectly still. Dormant, almost. Crowley was a creature of constant activity, of constant change, and it was _that_ thought, _that_ fear that made Aziraphale put a hand to the door and ask it in a whisper to let him through. It did as it was bid, swinging open into a dusty and pitch-dark hallway. Art and other bric-a-brac, all the debris of a life measured in millennia, crowded the narrow space. The dust on every surface suggested that nothing had disturbed this place at all in months.

Carefully ignoring thoughts of what he might find—Crowley incapacitated somehow, Crowley hurt, perhaps even by his own hand, Crowley hanging onto his connection to his corporation by a thread—Aziraphale crossed the threshold and followed the feeling of Crowley’s essence to its source.

He found a bedroom, choked in dust like the rest of the house, and inside, he found the demon asleep. Crowley looked so small in such a large bed, tucked up under a dark blanket like he was trying not to be seen. That part wasn’t surprising, really. Aziraphale knew Crowley liked to sleep. What was surprising was that he was _still_ asleep, even after Aziraphale called out to him from the doorway of his bedroom. Surely, he should have woken by now, surely his alarm spells would have roused him when—

Crowley’s alarm spells weren’t active. Aziraphale hadn’t noticed that earlier when he first passed through the wards, but he could see it clear as anything now when he took a second look with his ethereal eyes wide open. That was… unlike Crowley, to let himself be so vulnerable while he slept. Judging by the thin layer of dust that had accumulated over the top of the blanket, Crowley had been asleep for a while. He probably came straight here after their quarrel six months ago and put himself under without stopping to first shore up his defenses.

 _That’s a simple enough matter to fix,_ Aziraphale thought, and put a hand to the floorboards. He pushed some of his own power into the wards, just enough to activate the alarms but not so much that he made the place reek of angel.

Aziraphale knew he shouldn’t be here. Crowley might not have locked him out, but he hadn’t invited him in, either. He was intruding, and he should leave. Let Crowley rest as long as he needed. Give them both some space. As long as he was in bed here, surrounded by his defensive spells, he would be safe—from outsiders as well as from himself.

But first, he had a job to do here. With Crowley sleeping, he couldn’t be expected to do his upcoming temptation in Stockholm, which risked drawing the ire of his supervisors. Aziraphale couldn’t let that happen. He didn’t know what happened in Hell when one was given a reprimand, but he could imagine it was terribly unpleasant. His own reprimands he’d gotten over the years were enough to leave him trembling for days after, enough to make him feel as useless and wretched as a worm. Crowley hid things about Hell from him, but Aziraphale imagined their system had to be even worse than Heaven’s.

He was reluctant to hunt through Crowley’s things, though his hesitation proved unnecessary. The thing he was looking for—the written instructions for Crowley’s next assignment—was sitting out in the open, right on Crowley’s desk. Aziraphale slipped it inside his coat pocket and started to head out again. He spared a last glance at the sleeping demon and tamped down on the urge to go to his bedside, to shake him awake. It would be wrong to touch him while he was asleep, so Aziraphale kept his hands to himself…

A tiny miracle couldn’t hurt, though, could it? It was almost summer now, but depending on how long Crowley slept, it would get even colder in the coming months as autumn faded again into winter.

Aziraphale snapped his fingers and a heavy woolen blanket settled over the top of the bed. Crowley shifted in his sleep, twisting himself tighter in his bedding, and Aziraphale at last made himself turn away. When he left, the wards closed up so tightly behind him that not even a spider could creep back through.  


* * *

Two months later, Crowley was briefly roused by something like a sharp _ping_ echoing through his sleeping mind. It did not wake him fully, as it did not provoke in him the fear that the triggering of one of his alarm spells should have. Instead, he simply rolled over, not even bothered by the puff of dust from his pillow, and slipped right back into total unconsciousness.

Compared to the high ring of the alarm spell, it was no wonder that he’d slept straight through the quiet opening and shutting of his mail slot, and also through the soft susurration of a letter falling to the floor just inside. He also did not hear the near-silent whisper, threaded through with power, bidding him to sleep well and have pleasant dreams. He did, however, _feel_ it, and the rough edges of his dreaming thoughts were smoothed down like a pebble in a river.  


* * *

Stockholm was still a beautiful city, Aziraphale thought, especially this time of year when it was sunny and all the plants were in bloom. It wasn’t the _city’s_ fault that he’d been so miserable. No, that had been his fault and his alone. Aziraphale’s usual habit when visiting a city after a long absence was to wander about a bit and see what had changed. See what was new since he left, and what he still recognized.

That had been… a poor tactic this time, to put it mildly. To put it more bluntly, it had been pure masochism.

Coffee shops were still numerous, and he even recognized a few of them from the last time he’d been stationed here. The coffee was still delicious, and the tea still appalling. Then, he’d checked out the local used bookshops. Some were the same, and some were different. He found himself drawn to one in particular, one with a little flat above it where Crowley had stayed, once. It felt like that had been a lifetime ago, now.

It hadn’t been, though. Not really. A human lifetime, perhaps, but their own lifespans were far longer than that. Regardless, the used bookshop was gone. A cobbler’s shop had opened in its place. The little flat above it was occupied by a human family now, and he could tell even from the outside that it had undergone extensive remodeling. It probably would be unrecognizable from the place he’d warmed Crowley up after the foolish Serpent had let himself freeze half to death in the snow.

Of course, the thing that haunted Aziraphale the most about Stockholm was exactly the same as in his memories: The Royal Opera House. Every time he passed through the center of the city, he saw it looming large in his peripheral vision, impossible to ignore. It looked identical to the way he’d last seen it, that night Aziraphale decided to start taking risks to live his life on his own terms. Crowley had taught him to dance inside that building, first on the dance floor during a masked ball, and later when it was just the pair of them in the basement. That had been the night Crowley first kissed him. The night Aziraphale first learned what it was like to touch his demon like a lover.

Not _his_ demon, though. Crowley had never really been his, and he certainly wasn’t _his_ any longer.

In hindsight, Aziraphale thought as he trudged back home to his bookshop with his luggage in tow, he might have gone overboard complaining about that building while drinking at his hotel. He hadn’t been cautious of the ripples his words might have caused, and wondered vaguely if the opera house would still be there the next time he had cause to visit Stockholm. It _was_ a beautiful theatre, of course. It wasn’t the _building’s_ fault it made an angel so miserable to see it.

As Aziraphale stepped over the widest periphery of his own spellwork, which covered a few streets on all sides of his shop, he became aware of the presence of another angel in Soho. He felt his stomach twist into knots as he recognized the visitor.

At the same time, he felt incredibly grateful for the fact that he had taken an indirect route home, stopping by Crowley’s lodgings to drop off documentation on the demon’s half of the Stockholm job. Having such incriminating evidence on his person would have been disastrous. Even if hellish paperwork was impossible for an Archangel to detect (unlikely), Aziraphale might have given himself away through nerves alone.

Thankfully, he’d given himself enough of a buffer to calm himself and appear collected by the time he reached his home. Much of the act could be accomplished through careful control of his own corporation—his lungs and heart and digestive system all got turned off, as did his sweat glands… and his tear ducts, too, for good measure. The rest he accomplished with discipline and practice. By the time he pushed open his own unlocked front door and crossed the threshold into his own, occupied home, Aziraphale looked as close to the image of a perfectly deferential angelic soldier as he was capable of performing.

“Good afternoon, Gabriel,” he called, depositing his luggage in his office. The Archangel was nowhere in sight, but he _was_ here. He could feel his presence.

Aziraphale’s eyes flicked towards the ceiling, and he bit his lip. The dread rising inside of his corporation had no physical outlet anymore, so it simply filled him like he was a chalice, pooling inside of him with nowhere to go. He took his spiral staircase one step at a time, praying he wouldn’t spill any of it.

Naturally, Gabriel wasn’t milling about the upper floor stacks. No. He was waiting for Aziraphale inside his bedroom, the door to his most private sanctum left wide open. The Archangel had sat himself on the lid of Aziraphale’s chest, the one at the foot of his bed, the one that contained—fuck, fuck. All the… the toys, the paraphernalia, all of the _evidence,_ it was all tucked away inside a secret drawer a few inches beneath the Archangel’s blessed bottom. He didn’t know how long Gabriel had been here, didn’t know what all he’d _seen,_ what he’d _touched,_ what he _knew…_

Had Aziraphale not prepared his corporation to withstand shock, he might have fainted. Instead, he offered a weak smile and allowed himself to be invited inside his own bedroom.

“Welcome back to home base, buddy,” Gabriel said to him through a grin, fingers drumming on the lid of the chest. “Job go okay?”

“It… ah.” Aziraphale cleared his throat and tried to speak again. This time, it came out as less of a squeak. “Without a hitch, Gabriel. All the details are included in my forms, which are… um…”

Gabriel was holding his hand out, expectant, and Aziraphale rushed to pat down his pockets looking for the envelope he needed. He passed it on and spared another moment to be _incandescently_ grateful Crowley’s paperwork was nowhere in the building.

“Aziraphale?” Gabriel asked, his purple eyes still reading over the packet he’d just been handed. “Why do you have a bedroom?”

Even though it was turned off right now, Aziraphale’s heart still felt like it was lodged in his throat. His eyes, against his own better judgement, sought out every surface he and Crowley had fucked on over the last seven decades. The thankfully-still-made bed, the now-threadbare armchair in the corner Crowley had given him, the chest Gabriel was sitting on, most of the floor, some of the walls… Aziraphale wondered just how much it would hurt to be cast from Heaven, wings alight.

Gabriel was looking at him, eyebrows raised, and Aziraphale realized he still hadn’t answered. He tore his gaze away from the bottle of oil on his bedside table, nestled among bottles of perfume, and tried to explain.

“Well, ah. You see, it’s—it’s obviously not for _me._ I don’t sleep. Naturally. As an angel. One must be constantly vigilant against evil, of course. As an angel. And one cannot sleep on duty!” He heard himself laugh, higher pitched than normal and verging on hysterics. “But that is, ah… the function of a bedroom. That is to say, um, _sleeping_ in one. And the humans, well. The humans are terribly clever about when detecting that something is _off_ about other people—or, in my case, _not_ a person, because I am an angel. But I do keep the bedroom around to maintain the illusion that I am a human being like the rest of them. A person with no bedroom in their home would be, ah… quite suspicious to them, I’m afraid. So, needs must.”

As Aziraphale babbled, he became aware that Gabriel’s attention was once again slipping away. In the moment, he found himself so very pleased to find himself ignorable. The Archangel continued flipping through the packet of paperwork, looking bored. Before he’d even reached the end, he rose to his feet and banished the files with a quiet _pop._ The smell of ozone lingered in the wake of the miracle.

“Alright, alright.” He held his hands up in mock surrender. “No need to spend all day explaining human stuff to me. I _did_ sign off on the paperwork for the bedroom addition. Just thought it was a bit… weird, you know?”

“Right. Yes. Of course.”

“Your commitment to this whole human act is obviously faithful, Aziraphale. Even if I do feel like you might be overestimating the humans’ abilities at spotting an angel. They haven’t caught you yet, so they can’t be that smart.”

“They’re far cleverer than you’d expect.” Aziraphale surprised himself, the defense leaping out of his mouth automatically before he’d even had a chance to register it was a bad idea. He knew just as quickly that it hadn’t been _himself_ he’d been trying to defend.

A pacifying smile stretching his lips, Aziraphale watched—petrified—as Gabriel’s eyebrows crept up at hearing his little outburst. The moment felt like it stretched on for an eternity. At last, Gabriel started to laugh. It was patronizing, and definitely at Aziraphale’s expense, but it wasn’t… wasn’t a sign that he’d taken the comment as insubordination.

“Well, I guess you’d know. You’re _Aziraphale,_ after all. You’re the guy who’s probably spent more time with the humans than the rest of us combined. I honestly don’t know how you stand it.” Gabriel pulled a face. “But hey, you can’t argue with results. I mean, if you weren’t consistently getting results, you wouldn’t be the angel we trusted with Heaven’s London base of operations, now would you?”

There was a strange, metallic taste in the back of Aziraphale’s mouth. He didn’t quite know what it was, other than some desperate way his corporation had tried to circumvent his own modifications to it and find some physical outlet for his tension and fear.

Aziraphale found himself almost perversely grateful, at least in that moment, that they were having this conversation up in his bedroom instead of down on the shop floor. There was a look of amused distain on Gabriel’s face as he referred to this building—to Aziraphale’s _home,_ his chosen background to his life for more than half a century now. The place that even now, Gabriel was quietly reminding him wasn’t really _his_ at all, and could be taken from him the moment Heaven decided it should be. It was easier to bear that, he thought, up here in a room that was already a relic, a place to mourn a connection he’d once had and since lost. The real, original purpose of this room was already something he knew Gabriel would find disgusting. It was already something he was used to hiding from him and from everyone else.

But the _shop…_

If he’d had to hear Gabriel threaten this place while they were downstairs, in sight of all of Aziraphale’s books, in sight of the collection he had accumulated over a lifetime measured in _millennia_ that he had only just begun to be able to keep out in the open…

Aziraphale never wanted to apologize for the things he loved. His books, or the stories they contained. This building and the home it had become. His _life_ that he had built for himself. He didn’t want to apologize for those things because he didn’t feel something was _wrong_ about them… but he had to protect them, too, and he had learned over time that the best way to protect the things he loved was to minimize them and tuck them away out of sight.

“Quite… quite right,” Aziraphale said, eyes flicking upwards first to the sloping ceiling and then down at the tips of his own shoes. “I’d like to apologize for… for going off topic like that. Now, the, ah… the Stockholm business, which is what I’m sure what you really wanted to talk to me about here—”

“It was all in the file, right?”

He paused. “Ah… well. Yes? I believe so, at least.

“Well, I did _read_ the file.” Gabriel rose to his feet, smiling. “No need to waste time talking about it twice, then, hm?

“Oh… ah, well. No, I suppose there isn’t, then.” Aziraphale realized he was bouncing a little on the balls of his feet and forced himself to stop. “Was there… was there some other business you had at the shop—the, ah, the _base of operations_ today?”

Gabriel stuck out his bottom lip slightly and shrugged. “You tell me. Is there anything about the base that you needed to talk about with a supervisor?”

“No, not at all,” Aziraphale answered him quickly. Too quickly. Thankfully, he seemed to have fully lost Gabriel’s interest by now.

“I should be off, then. Back to Heaven’s business and all that.” The Archangel laughed, loud and sharp, as he headed for the bedroom door. Aziraphale backed out of his way and earned himself a slightly-too-intense clap on the shoulder for his trouble. “Not all of us get to sit around babysitting Her petting zoo all day, you know.”

“Yes, naturally. Naturally,” he mumbled, nodding, as Gabriel waved and slipped out the door.

Aziraphale made the mistake of taking in a deep breath and beginning the process of working up to a sigh. The Archangel’s sudden reappearance in the doorway nearly made him choke on it.

“Still,” Gabriel said, drumming the side of his fist on the doorframe. “Keep bringing your best to the fight, Principality. You did get the memo, right? Lot of demonic interference in this part of Earth. I even saw a few of them myself the last time I was here. Don’t let your guard down.”

Aziraphale shook his head too hard, feeling as if he might faint. “I will remain vigilant,” he promised, hating the tiny shake in his voice. He then added, with complete honesty, “I haven’t seen a demon around London in—in quite a while. I think they may have gone… dormant.”

“I’d think that would be a given.”

His mouth felt dry. “What?”

“You’ve been in Stockholm since February, right?” Gabriel tilted his head to the side by a degree. “So, it would make sense you haven’t seen any London-based demons in the last five months.”

“My human agents have been keeping me well-informed in my absence,” Aziraphale supplied, pleasantly surprised with the speed at which the lie leapt to his lips… and only a little bit guilty. “I’m confident that the situation is contained for the moment.”

Gabriel regarded him for a moment or two longer, then smiled. “Keep it up, then, Aziraphale. I’ll have catch up with you some other time, hm? Oh! And remember.” He pointed at him. _“Evil never sleeps._ Sandalphon came up with that one at the last staff meeting. It’s catchy, isn’t it?”

All he could do in response to that was nod, eyes wide. He gave a quick, involuntary prayer of thanks for the fact that evil was currently deeply asleep on the other side of central London and buried under a layer of wards so thick that the only beings who could find him were ones who already knew more or less where to look.

Aziraphale didn’t relax when Gabriel left the room, or even when he left the shop itself. Not even when he felt him leave the perimeter of wards around the building. No, it was only once he felt the faint atmospheric _crack_ of a larger teleportation miracle that Aziraphale finally let himself wander over to his chair in the corner and collapse into it.

It had been luck—luck and _nothing_ else—that had made Gabriel choose today for this random in-person check-in, rather than any other day in during those seventy halcyon years. Rather than one of the countless days that Crowley had been in the shop. In this very bedroom. In the _bed._ All their caution had been for nothing if it meant that _luck_ had been the only thing saving them.

One mistake could have seen Crowley destroyed permanently. So, too, could have random chance. How could they—how could _Aziraphale_ have gotten so complacent as to risk their lives like that, sometimes every night for _weeks_ running? It had been recklessly irresponsible, and thinking back on it, Aziraphale began to feel sick with himself.

The bookshop, dear thing that it was, did its best to help. A thick blanket nudged itself towards where Aziraphale sat. Downstairs, the oven in his back room was lit, and he would have bet almost anything that a kettle full of water was scooted to sit over the flame. Every lock in every door slammed shut, and Aziraphale felt the building shudder slightly as it grew a few extras just for his comfort and peace of mind.

Unfortunately, the only thing that could soothe _these_ nerves was, Aziraphale thought, time. Time away from Gabriel. Time for Crowley to stay out of sight, sleeping, until he’d calmed down enough that they could talk and Aziraphale could explain that they really ought to consider keeping away from each other, at least for a little while. At least long enough for Aziraphale’s side to forget about checking in with him.

Time, too, to figure out exactly what Aziraphale was supposed to do with his days now that his best friend would no longer be in them. Book repair, he’d learned, could only occupy so many hours before it began to feel like a compulsion. No, he needed something else. More than anything, he needed to be able to talk to someone he wasn’t having to bless for work.

There was only really one being he really knew how to talk to, _longed_ to talk to, and he was off-limits right now. He considered the possibility of trying to talk about any of this with anyone else, and to his surprise, he found that it didn’t sound entirely horrible, provided he could find another soul with common interests. Crowley understood him like no one else did, true, but… but perhaps there _were_ humans who could understand some parts of his life. The human perspective was always interesting to consider, even though it was markedly different from his own. If nothing else, it could be distracting. Maybe he could even find someone who would be interested in the kinds of boring things Aziraphale had to say.

He turned his corporation’s systems back on, one at a time. After his heart had been beating for a few moments, Aziraphale was finally able to recognize that strange, metallic taste in his mouth from earlier: blood.

Feeling around in his mouth with his tongue, Aziraphale discovered that there was a small injury to the inside of his cheek. He’d bitten it somehow, and now his corporation was bleeding into his mouth. It must have happened at some point during his conversation with Gabriel, but he hadn’t noticed in the moment. His corporation had ignored the pain signal, he supposed.

With a heavy sigh, Aziraphale pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the staircase to tend to the kettle. Perhaps a cup of tea would be good for him, after all.  


* * *

Crowley awoke with something close to a scream, his nostrils burning with the smell of sulfur. He kicked off the heavy blankets covering him—too heavy, heavier than he remembered them being—and looked around his bedroom for the demons he knew must be waiting to drag him back down to Hell for missing his assignment. _Assignments,_ plural, more than likely. He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping, but the state of the room seemed to suggest it had been quite some time.

No one was there, though. He was alone. He double checked it, stalking through the empty corridors of his lodgings, the blanket he was wearing dragging a path through the thick coating of dust behind him.

He was alone, and there was a letter from Hell sitting in a circle of char in his drawing room. Still smoking, still hot to the touch. That, at least, seemed to be the source of the smell, and its explosive appearance had probably been what had woken him. With shaking hands, he broke the wax seal and opened it, sure he was about to receive word of a reprimand, or worse, a long-term recall to Hell. Instead, it included details of a new assignment. It congratulated him, in Hell’s typically backhanded fashion, on his success in Stockholm and vaguely threatened him to keep up the bad work on his next job in Amsterdam.

Confused, Crowley wandered around his lodgings a bit more, trying to figure out why he wasn’t currently being torn to pieces in Hell for entirely skipping something he’d been ordered to do. He found his explanation next to his front door—a second letter, just under the mail slot, covered in dust. Inside was a duplicate form of the type he sent down to Hell, a copy to keep for his own records detailing a successful series of temptations in Stockholm written out in a perfect forgery of his own handwriting.

His chest felt too tight, and it wasn’t from the dust.

The Arrangement… was still on? It seemed as though it was, at least as of whenever this letter was dropped off. Aziraphale had done his work for him without being asked, had sent paperwork down to _Hell_ for him and left Crowley the proof.

And from the date on it—fuck. _Fuck._

Crowley had been asleep for three years.

If he hadn’t fucked things up so bad before he fell asleep, he could have had _three years_ in London this time between his assignments. He hadn’t had a holiday that long in _centuries._

He opened one of his smaller storage voids, one only filled with paperwork, and slipped the document inside. Ordinarily, he would have burned the thing. He burned all superfluous paperwork from work, and burned anything that might connect him to Aziraphale… but this wasn’t either of those things, was it? After all, it was written in _Crowley’s_ handwriting, and contained details about one of _Crowley’s_ jobs. There wasn’t anything suspicious about him keeping it.

Crowley wrapped himself tighter in his blanket—a blanket, he now realized, that hadn’t existed in this house when he’d gone to sleep—and shuffled through his dusty lodgings. He had a vague idea of getting himself cleaned up and washed before packing up for Amsterdam, maybe giving himself a shave and getting rid of some of the stubble that had erupted from his face while he’d been unconscious. Maybe send Aziraphale a bottle of wine in apology for sticking him with the whole of the Arrangement for three years.

He forgot all about those plans when he passed by the door to the conservatory.

Part of him wanted to walk away and leave whatever mess was in there to rot on its own. A bigger, more masochistic part of him wanted to see the damage. Of course, it was the second part he ended up listening to.

It was… about as bad as he’d been afraid of, really. Total loss, by the looks of it. Nothing that could be saved through normal means. Wasn’t terribly surprising. What plant could be expected to survive for three years without water?

What had once been a vibrant, lush space was now a ruin. The floor was littered in dry, brown leaves and, like the rest of the house, blanketed in dust. Stalks sagged out of the sides of planters and what few had managed to stay standing upright were bare and skeletal. Some of the corpses bore evidence of places where their leaves had curled up and burned from the sun, which was beating down from the windows like an accusation, illuminating the carnage in totality with not a spot in the room left in the shade.

Now that he was alert and calm enough to think about it clearly, now that he was seeing the evidence of the wreckage before him, guilt swam in Crowley’s stomach. He’d let them die. He’d killed them. _He’d killed all of his plants._

Worse was the realization that this was the _second_ garden Crowley had destroyed.

He raised a shaking hand, not quite sure if he was about to banish the mess or burn a bit more power—and risk Dagon flagging his miracle usage—to try to resurrect them, but something gave him pause. Most of his plants had been fragile, fussy things… but not all of them.

Some of them had been designed to weather immense hardship—a harsh design choice, he sometimes thought, to make something strong enough to survive more abuse rather than to make an environment that didn’t abuse the things that lived in it.

But, of course, that strange sort of kindred feeling had been part of why he’d bought the thing in the first place. _Selaginella lepidophylla,_ it was called in Latin. In casual English discussion, the _false Rose of Jericho,_ a name which had amused him. How could a plant be false? It wasn’t lying about what it was, it was just a plant. Besides, it was from Mexico. Complete opposite side of the bloody globe from Jericho. The thing had been sold to him as a good luck charm, which had amused him, too.

He found it quickly amongst its desiccated neighbors, small though it was. It was withered and brown, sitting curled up in its little pot, looking dead as the rest of the plants. As he touched it, however, he sensed a tiny little tendril of life sleeping inside it.

Crowley picked it up, kept it tucked inside his hand when he withdrew his arm inside his blanket cape.

 _Small steps,_ he thought.

First, he could get this thing a little dish of water and see if its other name—the _resurrection plant_ —was just a joke, too. If it lived, then… then he could let it teach the next plants he got to be a bit more fucking resilient. Grow himself a stronger garden from the survivor of the last.

After that, he could wash his face and shave off all this scratchy stubble. It was probably time he got rid of the sideburns, too. He’d had them for… what? Forty-fiveish years, he guessed. He was due for a change. It would be a bit weird seeing his sigil again after keeping it buried under hair for four decades, but he’d survived more dramatic chops and come back better for it.

Then, he could see about talking to Aziraphale. Well. _Talking_ probably wasn’t the best course of action there, not when he didn’t know what was going on in the angel’s life. Not when he didn’t know how he was feeling towards Crowley. After all, he’d gone out with a pretty big bang three years ago. From Aziraphale’s perspective, Crowley’s last known acts had included riding Aziraphale’s cock whilst having a panic attack, passing out cold, and then waking up just long enough to ask him for a lethal weapon… before slipping into a three-year coma.

Small steps were probably very necessary here.

A note… a note could work. Crowley could keep it brief and vague and unsigned, as usual. Write it in code. Just… reach out and let the angel know he was around again and willing to shoulder some of the brunt of their shared workload. See what kind of response—if any—he got in return.

And then he could begin doing the work of slowly, _slowly_ getting them back to the way things were.

Their argument—and Crowley’s continued inability to get his hands on a weapon to keep them safe—had been a definite setback, and Crowley was definitely still feeling pretty miserable in the aftermath of the whole thing… but he had hope. He had a three-years-dead plant in a dish of water that was slowly turning green again, and he had three-year-old letter from his best friend suggesting that they might _still_ be friends, and he had _hope._

He’d always had this persistent little spark of hope in him, no matter how many times he’d tried to snuff it out. Crowley used to think of it as a dangerous thing that might someday flare up and burn him up to ash from the inside out, and he used to try to keep it in check by reminding himself that Aziraphale would never feel the same way about him that he felt about the angel. He used to try to make himself understand that the very _best_ he could possibly get from Aziraphale would be a tentative friendship wrapped in plausible deniability, and for a time, it worked. It kept that spark of hope at bay.

It didn’t work anymore, and Crowley wasn’t sure he minded. The thing was, he just… didn’t care anymore. He’d finally accepted that even though there would always be distance between them, he and Aziraphale _were_ friends, and he liked being that… whatever version of _that_ they could be in that moment.

Aziraphale _did_ care about him on some level. He might have kept up the Arrangement out of self-interest, or to collect a favor once Crowley woke up, but people didn’t tuck people into bed unless they cared that they slept comfortably. Whatever name Aziraphale wanted to call this thing they had, Crowley wanted to keep it… and he was beginning to suspect it might be less ruined than he’d feared. He hoped he was right. He hoped that meant that maybe someday, after enough time had passed to smooth things over between them—and after Crowley had gotten his insurance—they might be able to try again.

In the meantime, he would back off. Keep his distance, which would be the safer thing to do right now, anyway. Let the angel know he was willing to keep working together and keep in contact, too. Let Aziraphale get calmed down and comfortable. And then, maybe, they could talk about this mess like a pair of nearly-six-thousand-year-old immortal beings. Then, maybe, they could revisit the idea of, if not even necessarily the whole _lovers_ thing, then at least trying late-night drinks at the bookshop again.

Crowley liked the idea of that, of sitting next of Aziraphale on the sofa and watching with perfect clarity (sunglasses tucked into his coat pocket) the way the angel’s nose and cheeks turned pink as he got drunk and giggly.

He’d understood the ways they had to dance around each other, once. He thought he could probably learn to do it again. Now that he knew that it was _possible_ for them to be close like they had been, that they _had_ managed it once before, he didn’t want to forget about it. That spark of hope was an essential thing to him, now, not something to be feared. It was the thing telling Crowley that he might be able to get that kind of trust back that they’d had together. That, if he were patient and diligent and didn’t lash out in fear, he might be able to grow that trust back up again between them from seed.  


* * *

Aziraphale’s first contact with Crowley came at the end of three years’ silence, and it arrived at the bookshop in an envelope. He’d known, somehow, the moment he got his hands on it, what it would be. Had known who had sent it, even though there was no return address. On reflex, he opened his celestial senses to look—it had become something of a habit over time—and was unsettled to find that, for the first time in three years, he could no longer feel Crowley’s presence nearby. Discomfort prickled beneath Aziraphale’s skin as he broke the seal and opened the envelope, terrified of what he would find inside.

It was a newspaper clipping from a publication written in Dutch—one that he was able to discern was circulated in Amsterdam, specifically, judging by the snippet of an article he’d been given. At the bottom was a short string of jumbled letters scrawled in familiar, cramped handwriting. A cipher, clearly, but one that was just fiddly enough that Aziraphale would need to take his time with it… time he was too on edge to comfortably spend scrawling page after page of notes cracking this thing. He found himself grumbling at Crowley under his breath in frustration as he hunted for a pen. If something was wrong, if he needed _help,_ he would hope that the demon would be sensible enough to not play games with his distress calls… but he’d never really known Crowley to be _sensible,_ had he?

He eventually settled himself enough to finally slow down and take a good look at the clipping, and it was then that he noticed the subject. It was an auction listing for a very early copy of _Elckerlijc,_ reportedly in excellent condition… and from the same printing as Aziraphale’s own copy that was housed in his shop. He found himself laughing as he hunted out the book, operating on a hunch and turning to the specific page and line that matched the date of the auction. His hunch paid off, and the phrase he found there was the key to decode the cipher in its entirety.

 _“My turn next,”_ the message said, and that was all.

He hadn’t really expected much more than that, of course. Their written communications were naturally brief and vague and always, _always_ unsigned. That was the nature of the thing. It was necessarily secretive, and necessarily included nothing that could be used as evidence against them.

Still, though, he found himself vaguely disappointed that Crowley had been unconscious for as long as he had and hadn’t bothered to include even an opaque mention to relevant information such as _how he was doing_ or _when he’d woken up and decided to trek all the way over to bloody Amsterdam without letting Aziraphale know not to worry._

It was, he knew, an irrational bit of anger. Anything more than this would have been terribly unsafe, and even if they hadn’t had a chance to _discuss_ things yet, he was grateful to the discretion Crowley had shown here. Gabriel had only popped down for a check-in two more times in the last three years, but Aziraphale was still living in terror of his next visit. This was the safest option, and he should be happy for any contact at all.

And it was more than that, too. Crowley _could_ have decided friendship with Aziraphale wasn’t worth it anymore if he couldn’t provide him with the weapon he wanted. He could have moved on, but he _hadn’t._ This note was something of an olive branch, a reminder that Crowley was still interested in continuing their Arrangement, and specifically that he was still willing to take on the risks of doing Aziraphale’s work for him. That he still thought of Aziraphale as someone worth keeping in touch with, even if he wasn’t useful to him as some sort of Heavenly arms dealer… which, Aziraphale had to admit to himself, had been a tiny worry that had crossed his mind. Three years was enough time to get properly worked up about a great many things, after all.

If the bookshop could talk, it might have reminded Aziraphale of one particular drunken monologue he’d delivered to it only a month prior. It might have parroted some of his more overwrought statements back to him, might have reminded him of the fact that he’d said such things as, _“I thought I was his Juliet, but was I just his apothecary? A means to an end, a supplier of poison… was that all I was to him?”_

Even if the bookshop _had_ the ability to talk, though, which it didn’t—at least not yet—it wouldn’t be so deliberately unkind. After all, it had gradually developed what limited sentience it had due to long-term proximity to _Aziraphale,_ and no creature could survive that much contact with him and not also learn manners.

Aziraphale calmed down enough to convince himself that this note was a good thing, both in terms of its secrecy and its implied meaning. His initial discomfort was likely just an expression of shocked relief at a silence being broken. After all, he’d missed Crowley so terribly for these last few years. It was like an ache he carried with him in his bones.

This note had been a reminder that even though Crowley was awake now, he’d likely have to keep missing him for many more years to come. Proximity wasn’t a luxury they had any more, not that they’d ever really _had_ it. Still, even after three years to think about it, Aziraphale hadn’t been able to make himself feel gratitude for Crowley’s shocking request and the resulting fight and separation, even if it _had_ come at the perfect time to save them from getting caught by Heaven. They’d let themselves grow far too comfortable and complacent, and time apart would be good for them both.

No matter how much it hurt.

If this type of coded communication was all he could ask for, Aziraphale was willing to try it. He wondered if perhaps responding in kind would encourage more of this behavior. Ciphers and codes were more Crowley’s domain—give Aziraphale a riddle or a snippet of poetic prophecy any day—but he did know how to construct one. Crowley loved taking apart complex puzzles and seeing how they worked. Perhaps he could derive a bit of entertainment from cracking this one.

It occurred to Aziraphale in that moment that Crowley likely didn’t own a copy of _Elckerlijc._ They’d seen it performed together early in the sixteenth century and Crowley hadn’t been terribly impressed. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn that Crowley had broken into this Amsterdam auction house to get his hands on this specific book to use to make the key to his cipher.

He grinned at the image that came to mind—Crowley always had so enjoyed his capers—but then found himself feeling a bit of inexplicable tightness in his throat. Crowley must have been paying a lot of attention to the books in Aziraphale’s collection to have been able to remember that he owned one specific printing of a play he himself hadn’t even enjoyed. Aziraphale wasn’t quite used to receiving that kind of attention—at least not in a way that didn’t feel like some kind of scrutiny.

Crowley was so secretive about his own collection of literature, even to the point of pretending like he didn’t enjoy reading at all. Aziraphale didn’t know what all Crowley owned, what books they might have in common. Shakespeare came to mind, naturally, as did some of the Greeks… but if they owned different versions of the book, it wouldn’t _matter._ It had to be something identical.

There was only one book he could think of that fit that description. A few years after the shop had first opened, Crowley had shown up with a pair of first edition copies of _Candide_ and a story that Aziraphale never fully believed about finding them both in a trunk he’d stolen as a part of a job.

 _“One for you,”_ he’d said, presenting them both to Aziraphale with a smile. _“And one for you to let the humans get their grubby hands all over.”_

Of course, Aziraphale would never let his customers make off with a gift like that, so he’d taken one of them up to his not-for-public-browsing stacks upstairs and bullied Crowley into keeping the other. Voltaire, after all, had been one of their favorite writers to argue about after a bottle or two of wine.

 _“I’ll take you up on that,”_ Aziraphale wrote out on a piece of scrap paper, leaving himself room at the bottom to translate it into a cipher of his own.

He went through several drafts of his reply, crossing out phrases that sounded too sentimental, too presumptuous. Aziraphale _was_ still upset with Crowley, still concerned with the way things had been left, but he didn’t want to be cold when Crowley took the time to reach out to him first. At the same time, he feared that if he were too warm, he risked drawing Crowley back to London and back into danger. Of course, he couldn’t just _say_ that, either. Any overt mention of their sides would be an enormous risk that could damn them both if this note were to wind up in the wrong hands. The best thing to do, he knew, would be to leave it unsigned entirely. He found he couldn’t do that, though, not after such a long spell of no contact whatsoever.

In the end, he gave himself the allowance of writing down two more phrases. _“Enjoy your travels,”_ was the first. The second he wrote out even more obliquely, letter by letter, with a dash in between to prevent Crowley tearing out too terribly much of his hair trying to unscramble gibberish: _“M-H-Y-G.”_

He put some thought into which passage to use as his key. There was a certain juvenile appeal in using the phrase, “to fondle the snake,” a line that had always privately amused him. It would be terribly inappropriate in this context, however, as the full line asked if there was anything more stupid than to _“fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away.”_

Aziraphale settled on leaving a hint in the form of a question. He hoped beyond hope that Crowley would pick up on the specific book he was referencing, and then be able to use that to find the specific page and line. He hoped that Crowley even still had his copy.

French had always been easiest for him as a written language rather than one that was spoken, so at the top of his page, he wrote, _“Optimisme. Qu’est-ce que c’est?”_ Beneath that, he copied his coded message. He did not sign it.

It was a bold statement, and one he hoped would not be taken the wrong way. Still, it felt… topical, if nothing else. He was due a bit of optimism, he thought. Perhaps they both were. The answer to the question, “what is optimism,” was a line that he hoped Crowley would remember.

_“It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.”_

Sending the letter directly to Crowley via miracle would be dangerous—what would happen if he were around humans when it arrived? Or worse, if he were in Hell? He had no address to send it the human way, either… but there were always compromises.

Aziraphale sealed his note up in an envelope and in the place where the recipient’s information would normally go, he wrote a line of spellwork. It was a simple little glamour that would make it appear like a perfectly normal piece of mail with a completely comprehensible name, address, and sender written legibly on the front. He didn’t want the thing tossed away by mistake, after all. Beneath that, he pushed just a _hint_ of power into it, a blessing so small he hoped Heaven would miss it entirely. He used larger miracles to heat up his teakettle sometimes, and Upstairs hadn’t bothered him about that in years. The purpose of this blessing was simply to ensure the letter ended up where it needed to go.

When all was done, Aziraphale inconspicuously miracled the envelope across Europe and into an Amsterdam postal services office. Crowley’s newspaper clipping note and envelope, Aziraphale’s rough drafts, and the pages he’d spent developing his cipher went into the upstairs fireplace. His copy of _Candide_ went into the secret drawer in the chest at the foot of the bed. It was too precious to him now to leave it out on a shelf where just anyone could see it. With all the evidence destroyed or hidden, there was nothing left for him to do but wait. He’d just have to have faith that his note would make it the rest of the way to its destination.

Out of habit, he opened a few of his eyes on another plane and Looked. Predictably, he saw nothing. Crowley was too far away to get more than a vague sense of direction. He closed his eyes and bullied himself into agreeing not to open them again, not like this. Not to try and check in on how Crowley was doing or where he was, no matter how close he came to London. Aziraphale had justified that kind of behavior when Crowley had been asleep, but now that the demon was awake again such a thing felt terribly presumptuous, if not outright invasive. No, he’d just have to make do with these letters, however often they could risk them.

If Crowley replied.

He needn’t have worried—though, of course, Aziraphale did worry—as his next reply came by post in a month. Again, unsigned. Again, brief and vague. And this time, written in a cipher built from another line of their paired volumes of _Candide._

Aziraphale tried not to let the elation of each new note fade back into disappointment at the start of the next long spate of nothing, but he always failed. He’d once been able to survive quite contentedly for centuries without so much as a glimpse of Crowley. He wasn’t quite sure how to do this anymore. It felt like someone had blessed him with a feast when he’d been starving, had kept him sated night after night with all his favorite foods, only to take it all away again and demand that he go back to surviving on crumbs alone. Seeing the demon weekly for months at a time for so many years had had ruined him. Being able to _touch_ Crowley had ruined him.

No one had touched Aziraphale in three years. Well, no one but Gabriel, but that had been a rather terrifying clap on the shoulder instead of anything that had served as a comfort. There were so many days where he felt less like a creature that lived inside its body and more like a pair of eyes and a pair of hands. Nothing else really felt _real._ For all he could tell, he was a perspective more than he was a person.

As the years passed and faded into decades, and Aziraphale found ways to occupy his time that were more active and less likely to leave him prone to moping, he tried to fix that. In the latter half of the ‘60s, he resumed regular visits with his barber—sometimes he even saw multiple barbers in the same month—and occasionally let his stubble grow enough that it could be shaved back down. He hadn’t had a beard in centuries, and he wasn’t about to start now, but the meditative scrape of a barber’s razor was soothing.

In the 70’s, he developed something of a fascination with stage magic. He couldn’t really explain it to himself, but there was something thrilling about learning a new skill after nearly six thousand years on Earth. It didn’t matter to him that it was frivolous, or that he could achieve better results with a miracle. There was something to be said for the appeal of learning to sharpen his ability to misdirect, conceal, and keep mum about secrets, especially in an environment where the stakes were so low. It was also _fun,_ both to Aziraphale himself and to the other humans in the class he signed on to take. None of the humans seemed to think less of him for being slow, or clumsy, or over-enthusiastic. Mr. Maskelyne was a very patient teacher, and the occasional clap on the shoulder he gave when Aziraphale succeeded at a difficult trick never felt like a shock.

Then, in the ‘80s, his world cracked open. He’d developed something of a friendship with a man named Silas in his magic class, by now a bit older than Aziraphale was purporting to be as Mr. Fell. Silas was something of an aged wastrel, a son of a rich family who never married nor made much of an effort to find a wife. He lived in Soho, too, alone in his flat save for his long-term butler, Jacob, and the pair of spinster women who cooked and laundered for the lot of them. Aziraphale wasn’t ignorant to the kind of secrets in that household, and he’d put a blessing on the four of them a decade ago, wishing them safety and privacy and happiness.

Silas, as it turned out, was not ignorant to the fact that Aziraphale carried secrets, too. One night, as they walked back to their homes together, he took Aziraphale into his confidence.

“You’re good with secrets, Fell,” Silas told him, taking Aziraphale’s hand in the darkened privacy of an alley. There was no intent behind it, he knew—Jacob alone held his friend’s attentions—but it _was_ meant to be a test. A risky one, at that. When Aziraphale squeezed his hand back, Silas smiled, and passed him a card. “There are other people like us, you know.”

The address on the card was for a building in Portland Place, a discreet gentleman’s club with secretive membership. Aziraphale signed on under an alias, and within his first day, he found himself welcomed into the group with open arms. Silas was there, Jacob sitting on his lap on the sofa in front of a dozen others, both smiling like they’d never known what it was like to be afraid.

It was the most alive Aziraphale had felt in twenty years. These humans were so friendly, so bright and clever. So many of them had minds for literature and philosophy and theology, and Aziraphale spent many a night playfully debating them over brandy. Their perspectives were, tragically, limited by their short life spans and lack of experience... but in a way, it was like speaking to so many brilliant songbirds as they extolled the joys of the tiny bursts of life they got to see.

Aziraphale found that he liked these men at the Hundred Guineas Club. Quite a lot, really, and they seemed to like him, too. And he liked being at the club. It really was the best way to interact with humans, he thought. No one there tried to buy his books, for one. None of them seemed to find him to be particularly odd, at least not to the point where they mentioned it. And all of them seemed to care what he thought about things.

There was a pervasive feeling of love in the air there. So many men found partners in the club, be they for a lifetime or only for the evening. All in deadly secret, of course. They couldn’t be hanged anymore if they were caught, not in England, not legally, but it would still mean ruin for them. Aziraphale tried not to think too hard about why he felt drawn to this place, to these men and their predicament. These humans who were outsiders within their own communities because of who they loved, because of how they were made, and they found ways to be happy anyway, even if it could never be more than a secret.

These men also liked dancing, and Aziraphale quickly got over his initial trepidation at trying that in front of another person for the first time in twenty years. By some remarkable coincidence, they all knew how to do the one dance he had memorized: the gavotte. Apparently, it was fashionable again in certain social circles, and Aziraphale relished the chance to try it again. He’d only gotten to do it the once, and it really _was_ supposed to be a dance for groups. The best way to do it, the humans told him, was with a whole room full of people. It was enjoyable in a group, he found.

These young men did the version of the dance that included kissing one’s partners, and Aziraphale had to admit… he enjoyed that, too. He was happy to take a bit of casual physical contact when he could get it, when it was freely given and without expectation. Aziraphale was old enough to remember times and places where a kiss was the preferred greeting, and on occasion, he found that he missed it. Nowadays, it seemed as though modern British society would prefer it if no one ever touched another living person under any circumstances at all. This kind of thing was a nice inversion of the rules in a way that felt somewhat safe.

The kissing was less nice one-on-one, though, Aziraphale discovered. It only took one try to figure out that he couldn’t replace what he had lost, and that he didn’t really want to. He’d thought that maybe sensation would take his mind off it, but it had only made him feel... cold. The young man had been so kind about it when Aziraphale had told him he’d changed his mind, and Aziraphale had sent a blessing after him that ensured he’d meet someone, another young human man who would love him like he deserved.

In groups, though, during the dance, those laughing, clumsy kisses that might as soon land on his nose as they did his lips... those kinds of touches made him feel connected. Made him feel like his lips and his nose, and his feet on the floor, and his hands clasped around other warm hands… were all still real.  


* * *

One of the most annoying things about Hell was how slowly it changed. The world outside was moving so quickly that it sometimes made Crowley’s head feel like it was spinning, but down here, the only things that changed with any frequency were the specific placement of the stains and which parts of the ceiling were leaking that week. It was _nineteen hundred_ now, and the only thing he could spot that was different from the last time he’d been here at the turn of the previous century was that the pen scratching terrifying notes in the margin of his file was a _ballpoint_ this time instead of the usual quill.

The sound of Dagon’s long, sharp nails clicking against her desk was slowly boring into Crowley’s skull. She had been looking over his centennial review paperwork for far too long for comfort, and Crowley didn’t know what part of this he dreaded most: this continued, agonizing silence, or whatever it was that she would say when she finally broke it.

They weren’t the only beings present, of course. The line for Dagon’s office stretched behind him into the bowels of Hell, every demon below the rank of lord waiting their turn to be examined and judged. The door, of course, was open. There was never any privacy in Hell, and the lower-downs wanted everyone to be able to see what happened to those who fell short. That’s also why they hadn’t yet brought in one of the surviving Erics to mop up the floors, which by this point were beginning to go tacky.

Behind his sunglasses, Crowley kept his eyes shut tight. His infernal senses, on the other hand, were on high alert. He wasn’t looking so much at Dagon—he knew where she was, and if she decided he was to be issued a reprimand, there wasn’t anything he could really do about that. No, what he was paying attention to was what was behind him. It was always best practice to watch one’s back while in Hell, and that went double for moments when Crowley found himself in such close proximity to one of the demons who’d somewhat recently gotten his claws into him.

Nearly forty years had passed since the last time other demons had attacked him, but Crowley wasn’t likely to forget that day as long as he lived—more for the breakup than for the torture, really, as only one of those things was an actual _new_ type of pain for him. Still, though, he’d looked into the demons in question since then, including this one. The one who used to sing while he worked. Ozzoth was the name he went by now, though of course neither of them could remember the old one. He’d found a similar niche down in Hell, Crowley learned. While he used to build nebulae in Heaven’s forges, these days Ozzoth was gainfully employed stoking Satan’s hottest furnaces and keeping their side’s supply of Hellfire burning bright and hungry. It wasn’t a prestigious job, or a pleasant one, but if any demon summoned Hellfire, it came from his department, and it would be that department that would someday provide it in weaponized form when the End Times came.

That tidbit of information did serve to explain the smell, at least, both as it had clung to Ozzoth’s hands and how it had leeched into Crowley’s clothes and lingered even after he’d made his escape. The rest of the ones who’d cornered him had been his coworkers.

More than once during the past thirty-eight years, Crowley wondered if that would have been his lot down here, too, if he hadn’t proved himself a competent tempter up in Eden. A life spent down in the deepest parts of Hell, constantly sweating his arse off, doing the same thing for every single moment of his eternal existence. Surrounded by malicious bastards who used their rare trips into the comparatively more habitable parts of Hell as opportunities to hunt down and maim anyone slow or distracted enough to catch.

It made gargling Holy Water actually sound like a passable alternative.

Right now, Ozzoth was standing about four paces in line behind Crowley, his scaly bird feet tapping the tacky floor with naked impatience. Crowley could smell him from here, and worse, he could feel the other demon’s attention on him, could feel those beady, wide-set eyes locked onto the back of his own head with the unblinking gaze of a predator. His aura was also searing itself into Crowley’s infernal senses, cracking and smoking and smoldering against the edges of his perception like it was trying to brand him.

All things considered, Crowley was feeling pretty great about the fact that he was in _front_ of this arsehole in the line, as he would hopefully be long gone by the time Dagon was done with Ozzoth’s review. Still, it wouldn’t do for him to lose focus now.

“Tell me something, Crowley.”

His eyes snapped open. “Yes, my Lord?”

Dagon fixed him with a flat, ichthyic stare. When she spoke, her tone was unreadable. “It has been a productive century for you, has it not? Your numbers for greed and gluttony are tripled from last review. Satan’s intrigued by your ongoing potential.”

A massive amount of tension dropped from his shoulders, and it was all he could do to keep from openly sighing in relief.

“It’s my work in automation,” Crowley answered smoothly, plastering on his best smarmy grin. He even dared to balance a hand on Dagon’s desk so he could lean down and point at his file. Sometimes confidence won you a lot in Hell, and it was a risk he was used to taking. “The assembly line. Steam power and interchangeable parts. The humans are calling it the Industrial Revolution. Thought it was fitting. I know how much we enjoy those Down here, yeah?”

“Yes, Crowley. I know. The Industrial Revolution. It’s all in your file. Even if it weren’t, I’ve been present for all your presentations about your pet project. It was what you pitched me at your _last_ centennial review, if you recall.” She toyed with her ballpoint pen, clicking the end of it twice before using it to nudge Crowley’s hand off her desk. The grin she gave him was sharp and oily. “Some of the baubles are fun, I’ll give you that, but a hundred years in… it’s old news, yeah?”

“Well, it’s only going to get worse from here—”

“What I’ve noticed, Crowley,” Dagon said, smoothly cutting him off, “Is that your successes in that one area seem to have covered up for a deficiency in another.”

Crowley fought to stay calm and steady, to keep his shrug and tilt of his head casual and flippant—but not so flippant that Dagon would try to bite his throat out over it. “Where’s that?”

The pen tip tapped down right in the middle of his file, hard. “Lust,” she said, her pale eyes watching him, clearly looking for him to squirm. He didn’t give her the satisfaction. “Your lust temptations have been steadily declining in frequency for the past few centuries, but they took a massive drop just before the turn of the last one. They haven’t picked back up since.”

“Ah. Well...” Crowley began, looking for a hook. “You know humans. Most of them are pretty freaky these days. It seemed like a waste of Hell’s resources to try to tempt them towards something they already planned to do. But if we need more occupants in the second circle, I can get you those numbers.”

He waited and waited, sure he was about to be dragged off to a pit somewhere for insubordination. Dagon just stared at him, twiddling her pen between her talons. Tapping the tip against her desk.

“Just get it done,” she said, sliding his paperwork back across to him. “Your other numbers are high enough to save you right now, but if this revolution of yours crashes on you, or if I notice you’re still slacking by the next time your file crosses my desk, I’ll supervise your reprimand myself. Is that clear?”

“Abundantly,” Crowley smiled a rigid smile as he took his file in hand, careful to make sure he didn’t seem too desperate to leave. He tipped his hat to her on his way out. “See you around, then, Dagon!”

“Crowley?”

He paused, awkwardly sharing the threshold to her office with the next demon in line, an unfortunate bastard that was about as broad as a musk ox and covered in weeping sores. “Hm?”

Dagon waved the big guy on inside, and leveled Crowley with a look that left him no doubt that she was giving him an order. “Give this next one a personal touch.”

Crowley smiled at her. “Personal touches are my specialty. Ciao, Dagon.” He ducked out of her office and walked—careful not to look like he was _running,_ lest something decide give chase—the rest of the way out of Hell.

Finding a human willing to fuck him wouldn’t be difficult, not even one who was willing to sin to do it. Adultery was a relatively easy box to check off, especially as humans were still determined to keep marrying one another for reasons unrelated to common interests or mutual attraction. Dagon hadn’t specified _who_ he was supposed to shag, just that he needed to, which made things easier, too.

A few hundred years ago, Crowley would have considered this a softball assignment. He _liked_ sex, and he used to really enjoy casual encounters now and again when the mood struck him. By all accounts, the humans had enjoyed themselves, too. He never used to feel scummy walking away from this kind of job, because he could walk away without feeling like he’d corrupted someone’s life. _Especially_ the life of someone who didn’t really deserve it.

Now, though? It just seemed like a lot of work for very little reward. Aziraphale had ruined him for this, the bastard. How dare he introduce Crowley to a kind of sex where he _didn’t_ have to spend the whole time paranoid that the person whose genitals he was touching might see a bit of scale or the fork in his tongue or, Satan forbid, his fucking tail. The other kind of sex didn’t just seem exhausting now, it also seemed… uncomfortable. On his part, and on the part of the human, too. He didn’t like the idea of fucking someone who didn’t know he was a demon. Someone he assumed would react in horror if they found out the truth. Among other ethical concerns, he didn’t really like the idea that he’d be fucking someone who’d be disgusted with him if his concentration slipped. It made it a _little_ hard to get into the mood.

To say nothing at all of the real reason sex with humans had lost its luster.

These days, Crowley was staying in a hotel room above a cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. He was well aware of the kinds of things that happened downstairs in the shadowy corners. And upstairs in the other rooms. And sometimes in the stairwells, the participants so engrossed that Crowley found himself needing to step over them to get back up to his room. He was kicking himself for not thinking to take credit for some of that debauchery all along.

He perched himself on a barstool and projected an aura of _“desperately horny, and no, of course not horny in a demonic way, why would you ask that?”_ so hard it could probably be seen from space. A few hopefuls approached him, and he drank everything they bought him until he found two humans who were not only attracted to him but to _each other._ One of them was even married and very much interested in tearing asunder what God had joined. Crowley took them both upstairs and left the rest to fend for themselves.

As he had already planned on leaving this place in the morning, Crowley decided to be a gracious enough host to let the humans have the bed. He didn’t interfere with them any further except to do a quick demonic miracle to make them forget they came up here with a lanky redhead currently on his way to camp out awkwardly in the en suite until they left. They’d remember him being a much more active participant in anything that happened here after it was over, though. If one or both of them actually ended up Downstairs when they died, he didn’t want to leave it to chance if someone decided to check up on this. Dagon had a disturbingly long memory and kept grudges like other people collected stamps.

When he booked his accommodations here, he’d paid extra for a room with a big enough bath to drown himself in—or to be more precise and a bit less melodramatic, one he could fit his legs in without having to tuck his knees up under his chin. He locked himself in and drew himself a bath hot enough to scald a human, then sent a quick muffling miracle in the direction of the door when it became clear that the running water wouldn’t be loud enough to cover the sound of what was starting to happen back in the bedroom.

Crowley slipped under the water until nothing could be seen of him above the surface, and then he let his careful control over his own corporation slip away, too. It felt like setting aside a heavy load, one he’d been holding onto for so long he’d forgotten how much it weighed. Scales rippled all the way up from the arches of his feet to the backs of his thighs, up over his lower back and around the sharp jut of his hipbones. His fingers and toes stretched and sharpened, and the bones in his jaws shifted so that, if he wished, he could open his mouth far wider than he ever could in a strictly humanoid form.

Just because sex with humans didn’t hold any appeal didn’t mean he no longer missed _sex._ Crowley had gotten increasingly more familiar with his own two hands over the last thirty-eight years… among other body parts. When he wasn’t working, or sleeping, or drinking with some of the more tolerable artists that haunted this part of the world, Crowley could usually be found making himself happier in the short term if maybe a bit more pathetic in the long term. It was a good way to relieve tension and he needed something like that right now after the day he’d had.

He wanted some penetration, but his hands were all wrong to finger himself like this, as he’d never been one to enjoy stabbing himself in the sphincter. As he closed his eyes—yellow from corner to corner, now—he let himself imagine the exact hands that would feel right. Thick and strong, skilled at what they did. The nails clean and shiny and buffed to perfection.

Crowley had other options for fucking himself besides his hands, though. He palmed his cock, giving it a quick tug under the head as he let his tail grow out to its full length. It was still an unfamiliar sensation even in this halfway form as he so rarely gave himself both a tail _and_ limbs at the same time, at least not on purpose. He shivered through the transition until his tail was long enough to coil around one of his thighs. Even though it was a part of his own body, it felt alien enough that he was able to pretend it was a warm, strong hand when he used it to part his own legs.

He shifted himself upwards enough that his face was above water—he didn’t trust himself not to forget he didn’t need to breathe and end up _actually_ drowning himself with a hand still around his cock. Now, _that_ would be a meeting with Dagon that neither of them would soon forget.

These days, Crowley didn’t tend to make much noise when he fucked himself, as most of the fun with that, in his experience, came from being _heard._ With his tongue like this, it would come out as a lot of hissing anyway, and the whole _point_ of this exercise was to enjoy himself, not get annoyed at his own lisp. Besides, he needed that tongue elsewhere. He had a whole system for this now. While his hands kept his cock busy and he fucked himself on the tip of his own tail, the forks of his tongue could work over his nipples one at a time. They were even more dexterous than a pair of lips could be… though he knew which one he’d prefer if he only got to choose.

Water lapping over his body like a caress, Crowley opened himself up by degrees. The stretch of it only stung a little, and most of that was from the heat of the water. He could only fit a few inches of his tail inside himself before it tapered to a width that wasn’t comfortable anymore, but he was still able to reach his prostate this way. Tonight wasn’t a night for teasing himself, though, or for drawing out his pleasure until it overwhelmed him. He was chasing release tonight, and not much else, so he massaged himself with a steady rhythm that had arousal pooling in his belly like molten honey within only a few minutes.

Crowley was in a unique position right now, as opposed to where he had been in other points in his wanking history. He’d gotten the chance to fuck his best friend for seventy years running, and demonic memories didn’t tend to fade much with time. If he wanted to, he could play any one of those scenes in his mind with near-perfect recall. He could summon up the exact image of Aziraphale fingering him while sucking him off, or of Aziraphale fucking him with a toy while he played with the head of his cock—and Crowley would be a liar if he tried to pretend to himself that _none_ of those memories crept into his thoughts, especially as he felt himself nearing his peak.

What he wanted, more than anything, though, was for Aziraphale to be here _now._ Not to remember how the angel had looked in 1820 or in 1799, but to know how he might look _tonight._ To be able to see the expression on his face as he looked over Crowley’s body, bestial even as it was in this moment. In Crowley’s imagination, the look in his eye would be the twin of the way the angel had looked at him when Crowley had taken his sunglasses off that last time they’d fucked.

He came over his own fist, hissing between his teeth, to the image of the angel opening his wings over the bathtub to mantle them both beneath a canopy of soft, white down.

His spend dissolved in the water almost immediately, and Crowley freshened up his bath with an impatient wave of his hand. He wasn’t ready to get up out of the tub yet and face the paperwork for this imaginary liaison with the humans. Besides, said humans probably weren’t even _done_ yet. He was hesitant to drop the miracle on the door to check. Best give it until morning. In the meantime, Crowley could sit in here in a decadently hot bath and feel pitiful. Maybe he’d even nap some more.

As a precaution, he forced all of his serpentine aspects back inside of himself—well, he _did_ pause to remove the tip of his tail from his anus first, and _then_ he retracted the whole apparatus until his spine was close to a respectable humanoid length again, give or take a few vertebrae. If he did end up passing out, he’d hate for some of the hotel staff to walk in and see something that challenged their faith in a loving God. Not when he was off the clock, anyway.

So, this was his life, he supposed. Crowley wondered when it had started to feel quite this small. He’d always spent a lot of energy resenting Hell, but this was just... well, in addition to the exhausting terror of getting such a threatening review today, the orders he’d been given were also very fucking annoying. He’d done _excellent_ work that last century, and if Satan liked it, that should be enough. He shouldn’t have to be told in the same breath that he wasn’t shagging quite enough humans these days. It was degrading, getting orders like that. Though, he supposed, that was probably the point.

If he was going to have to keep engineering his way around situations like this for a while, it was probably good timing that he was already estranged from Aziraphale. He liked to keep these kinds of petty things away from him. It wasn’t that Crowley feared the angel might judge him for them. Rather, he expected Aziraphale would probably get all righteous about his autonomy or something. Or, worse, that he might even try to take some of these jobs from him by invoking the Arrangement. No. It was best Aziraphale never heard about this kind of indignity. Even though he was able to find loopholes and workarounds, he knew Aziraphale would be upset by the fact he was given orders like these at all.

But _fuck._ He was tired of keeping away. Tired of only speaking to the angel he loved through fucking coded notes only as often as the human postal service could send them across the continent.

He miracled his bottle of wine from his bedside table into his hand and took a swig directly from the mouth of it. Fuck, he was getting tired of living like this.  


* * *

The twentieth century did not agree with Aziraphale, he found. The human world was changing so quickly that he gave up on changing with it. Being left behind was a terrifying feeling, but not one that was particularly unfamiliar to Aziraphale. He was used to it, and there were worse things to be. Aziraphale picked his battles, opting to devote his attention to only the most important developments—literature, the broadest strokes of global politics, and the rapidly shifting objectives sent down to him from Up on high.

Smaller concerns, things like modern music, new technology, and vernacular speech… those he felt like he could safely afford to ignore. He even stopped bothering to stay current in his fashion. It didn’t matter. He’d always been a bit slow at adopting the newest styles, and the clothes he’d had made last century were still in serviceable shape. Aziraphale could afford to let the humans think of him as a somewhat strange, out of touch old man. He _was_ all of those things, after all, except for the fact that he wasn’t even close to being a man.

The beginning of the century was especially grim. Losing Oscar Wilde had been particularly difficult, and in so many ways. Aziraphale grieved for the man himself, yes, as he grieved for all the humans that he let himself know well enough to consider a friend. It was always painful to grow to care for individual mortals, as their lives were so brief and so fragile, and there was so much that they could never understand. So, too, was his death a blow to the state of literature itself. A brilliant light went out that year, snuffed out far too early, and all the world was dimmer for it.

Even more specifically, though, Aziraphale grieved for the damage Oscar’s death dealt to their shared community. Over the last few treacherous years, he’d gotten to watch the way Oscar’s treatment weighed on the rest of the humans in the Hundred Guineas Club. He’d seen how _afraid_ so many of them became. His arrest shook them, as did the trial. The sentencing. His death, too, when that time came. It shook their group to its core. So many men left during that time, never to return. They went back to their lives and tried to hide or suppress their love as a way to try to save themselves.

It was a small, hollow mercy that Silas hadn’t been around to have to see all of that. A sudden bout of pneumonia had taken him two winters before the arrest. He caused a bit of scandal back at his family home, in death as he always liked to in life, when his siblings learned that their bachelor brother’s will left everything he owned to his servants—including his Soho flat.

Most of the money, of course, went to Jacob, but Silas also gave quite a tidy sum to his cook and his laundress, who were soon hired together by another gentleman in the club to work out their last remaining years before what promised to be a cozy retirement. His siblings were furious, but there was nothing they could do besides ban all of them from the funeral. The club held one for Silas in secret. Jacob never returned to the club after that day, and Aziraphale heard he’d sold the flat and retired to the countryside.

Aziraphale, for his part, tried to stay with these humans for as long as he could, knowing that it was inevitable that he would have to leave them. Knowing that once he left, he wouldn’t be able to return until everyone who knew him was dead… and at that point, why come back at all? He watched as the original cohort dwindled away, replaced by younger faces Aziraphale didn’t know—but fewer in number than there once had been. The old guard was getting older, and they were starting to notice that Aziraphale wasn’t.

When at last Aziraphale did step away, he didn’t go far. He simply retreated back inside his bookshop and sealed himself up within. The bookshop, in turn, grew up around him like a particularly thorny weed. It was trying, Aziraphale knew, to protect him. To keep others away from him. It pulled layers of dust up over his books like a blanket to hide them, hid everything else as it darkened its windows and its oculus with a clinging film of grime. The spiders got to work building extra webbing to hang in sheets from the ceilings in the corners and collect still more dust. The shop’s signature offensive weapon was the smell, a persistent and lingering odor of mildew and damp and rot—an illusion, of course, as the shop wouldn’t let damp get anywhere near its angel’s books. As for the angel himself, it tried to keep him in comfort as best it could.

Aziraphale didn’t mind the shop’s transformation. In fact, he encouraged it. The bookshop never closed, at least not officially, but he did his best to discourage customers. He changed the shop’s hours several times over, twisting them into something like a riddle in hopes that the public wouldn’t be able to find its way inside. All he wanted was to stay here alone with his texts and not be bothered by humans who weren’t his friends. Humans who only wanted to come here to take his books away, to hollow out this building even more than it already had been.

This place that was his home _was_ hollow, truly, like a cask drained dry by a slow leak. It had been for such a long time. What it _wasn’t,_ though, was empty. Aziraphale used to think it was empty, but he knew better now. It was full to bursting with memories. They hung in the air and soaked into the upholstery like lingering smells, like perfume, perhaps, or maybe more like cigarette smoke.

There were traces of _him_ everywhere he looked, in every book in Aziraphale’s quite extensive collection. Many were literal traces of him, places where Aziraphale could look between the words to see where the demon’s hands had worked—there, that one arguing about Eden and that first original sin, and beside it, one arguing about the pull of gravity holding in sway the planets and stars. The sound of his laughter was pressed like a wildflower between the pages of human treatises on misconception, preserved for eternity.

 _“Do you remember, angel?”_ The memory was almost like a voice in his ear, so clear that he almost turned back to look towards the empty settee on reflex. _“Do you remember when they thought the sun revolved around the Earth?”_

Other books contained a more oblique portrait. Some were written by mutual friends, some by people who had clearly met the demon and had found inspiration there. Artists often did.

Even books Aziraphale could reasonably assume had no actual connection with the demon still hurt to read. His own mind betrayed him, finding connection where none existed organically. The old books carried with them memories of when he’d first read them, and where Crowley had been then. The new books had a sweet ache to them, that longing to ask what Crowley thought of them.

He could imagine him in every plot, sometimes as hero and sometimes as villain. Many times, as both. Memories resurfaced of things he’d done—or, worse, that _they’d_ done—in every setting. He was Lady Macbeth and her wicked counsel. He was Puck and his capricious mischief. He was Romeo, making the mistake of his life as he sought to find his mortal drugs.

He was Ophelia floating in the water.

He was…

He wasn’t _here._ Close to half a century had passed since he had last been here, and Aziraphale was so very lonely.

Many of the books he couldn’t even touch now, those ones that were precious gifts doled out over millennia. When he touched them, all he could feel were fingerprints on leather where another hand once rested. He hadn’t even taken his copy of _Candide_ out of its hiding place in a decade. Aziraphale had it memorized now, anyway, right down to the page numbers, and he was able to crack each of Crowley’s notes within seconds of opening them.

Those notes brought him a small bit of solace, provided him the proof he sometimes needed that he hadn’t entirely imagined this dear demon who still bewitched his heart. Even so, they were still just paper. That was all Aziraphale had for comfort these days. Paper. Ash, too, as he had to burn each precious note he got.

Aziraphale did have his memories of happier times, of course, and they were sharp and clear as ever, but they were still of little help. They were more like ghosts to him, visiting him in the quiet hours to test his faith and shake his resolve.

 _“It’s been four years since they last checked in,”_ he’d think, sometimes. He had always been too good at tempting himself. _“Surely that’s long enough. Invite him over, just for one night. Surely we deserve just one night.”_

Four years was too short a time to forget the way Gabriel’s nose had wrinkled in disgust at entering Aziraphale’s home. It was pleasing, though, in a morbid sort of way, to learn that the shop’s human deterring efforts worked at least in part on Archangels.

He never gave in and invited Crowley over, though. He knew with certainty that if he ever did, it wouldn’t be for just one night. There was no way. Aziraphale was too greedy to ask for only one, too greedy to hold himself to that.

Greedy enough that he’d broken one of his rules and kept a memento for himself. A token, a physical thing that he could hold in his hand. Aziraphale justified it to himself by saying that he’d simply found it rather than it being something Crowley had given him, so therefore it didn’t count. There was a perfectly legitimate reason for Aziraphale to have kept a publicly accessible photograph of his nemesis in his shop. “Research on the opposition” would be his defense if he were ever asked.

The photograph had been printed in a newspaper. Crowley wasn’t even the focus of it. He’d been just one figure in a crowd, but he might as well have been the only thing in frame for all the attention Aziraphale paid to the other people in the shot. Aziraphale had always been terrible at looking away once he’d gotten the chance to see Crowley. There was nowhere else he’d rather look.

Aziraphale clipped the photograph out with the pair of scissors on his desk—golden, delicate things with handles shaped like feathered wings, because Aziraphale truly was predictable. The picture lived out its days in darkness, tucked in between the pages of a book on botany. It only saw sunlight on those days when Aziraphale found he needed to hold something tangible in his hands that he wouldn’t need to burn.

Over the years, the paper was run between shaking fingers like a worry stone until it grew soft and fragile. Until its black ink and gray paper were rubbed to nothingness under the gentle ridges and whorls of the fingerprints of an angel left alone for the longest decades of his immortal life. By the time he thought to miracle it, it was too late. The damage was already there. Aziraphale knew if he tried to fix it, he would always know what he had done… and besides, the newsprint could never show him what he _really_ wanted to see. It could never show him that teasing smile, those golden eyes, that red hair…

That was the difference between memories and physical things. A memory was an accurate retelling of events as Aziraphale understood them, but he could never hold one in his hand. A physical thing could be held, yes, but it could also be broken. Discovered. _Destroyed._

He might not have burned the photograph, but in the end, he hadn’t needed to. Aziraphale got rid of the evidence with his own clumsy fingers.

When the war came, Aziraphale lost whatever stagnant security he’d built for himself in his dusty home. Heaven reached down and unceremoniously transplanted him to the front. He also lost access to Crowley entirely during those years, even though he could _feel_ how much nearer the demon was to him in terms of physical, geographic proximity. Crowley was there at the front, too, somewhere among the masses. He might as well have been in outer space.

They were closer together than they had been in fifty-two years, but they couldn’t see one another. Couldn’t trade work and keep up the Arrangement. Couldn’t even send a simple _note,_ because for the first time in several thousand years, Gabriel and Sandalphon decided to station themselves on Earth full-time, and Aziraphale was rarely out of their sight. They wanted to watch the humans wage their war, wanted to learn from them as they bled one another dry. Aziraphale heard rumors that some of Crowley’s lower-downs had made the trip up to the surface to watch the carnage, too.

He was told that this was to be something like a dry run, or a training exercise, but Aziraphale lived in fear that this would really be _it._ That this was the End. All of the horsepeople were here, working on their own projects and occasionally teaming up in pairs. Aziraphale saw them sometimes. They were similar enough in appearance to a real human that one might be fooled at a distance. They left their marks, though, on the people and on the Earth itself. The flares that lit up No Man’s Land at night burned the color of War’s hair.

Aziraphale’s biggest regret during that time was that he never been brave enough to try and patch thing up with Crowley before the world was destroyed.

By the time the war ended, Aziraphale was ready to crumble. To give in, to drag Crowley inside his shop and beg him not to leave. Beg his forgiveness. Apologize. For everything, for nothing, for _anything_ that might convince the demon to stay by his side.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t up to Aziraphale where Crowley went. Neither, he supposed, was it up to Crowley. While Aziraphale’s side seemed content to release him back to his London post once the hostilities ceased, Hell moved Crowley over to America on a semi-permanent placement. The silly idiots over there had decided to ban alcohol, and the subsequent explosion of vice and sin that resulted apparently necessitated the undivided attentions of Hell’s best field agent.

They could, at least, resume their written correspondence. Over time, the letters grew longer and more detailed, though they remained encoded and never exceeded about a page in length. Crowley also started up the practice of sending over the odd little parcel or gift. In spite of their other faults, Aziraphale had to admit that the Americans _did_ make tasty sweets.

One such gift was the case of sweet red Italian wine of a particular vintage, delivered to Aziraphale’s doorstep on one _very_ particular spring day in 1920. Naturally, it bore no information about its sender. Aziraphale brought it inside, looking at it with something like trepidation. He feared that such a large gift might mean that this century could be the first time in nine hundred years that they wouldn’t be able to meet up in person to celebrate the Arrangement. Unfortunately, he ended up being right about that.

On one of the last, bitterly cold days of December, another unmarked package made its way inside Aziraphale’s home. It was a book of sheet music of Johann Strauss I’s works, and as Aziraphale flipped through it, he found a scrap of paper tucked inside like a bookmark. A question was written there in familiar, cramped handwriting.

Once he’d deciphered it, Aziraphale saw that it asked, _“Was this it?”_

The page the note was marking contained a composition titled _Exotische Pflanzen—_ “Exotic Plants.” Aziraphale hummed the tune as he read the music, closing his eyes as he remembered when he’d last heard it. As he remembered the harmony of his voice and Crowley’s, humming the same tune in the quiet bookshop as they danced together so very late at night.

That last night before it all went so very wrong.

Aziraphale himself hadn’t remembered the name of the song that had been stuck in his head that night, or the name of the composer. He hadn’t even known the entirety of the melody. Still, _somehow,_ Crowley had not only remembered something so tiny as a fragment of a tune Aziraphale had hummed to him once nearly sixty years ago, but he had _actually_ managed to track down that specific song.

He tried to keep his foolish heart in check, but Aziraphale couldn’t deny even to himself the fact that it looked like that night had meant quite a lot to Crowley. His only hope was that it might even be the same thing that it meant to himself.

It was hard to trust his own perceptions, but it looked terribly a lot like love.

As this was a special occasion, Aziraphale made a rare concession to modernity, the first in quite a long time. His inspiration came in the form of a memory of his time at the Hundred Guineas Club. One of the men had brought over a novelty gadget that played a horrible, scratchy rendition of a song when one turned the crank on the side. They’d all done their best to dance to it, and then collapsed in laughter when they discovered that Silas—a mischief-maker even then, in his seventies—was speeding up the music.

There were newer gramophone models available these days, ones with far better sound quality. Aziraphale purchased one for the shop, and even managed to find a recording of _Exotische Pflanzen._ He set it up on his own, too, a feat he was oddly proud of. It was a fiddly device, something he feared he might break, but he fortified his nerves with a glass of sweet red Italian wine and soon outfoxed the mechanical beast.

Aziraphale knew that he was still alone, was still keenly aware of the way his home felt like such a hollow, haunted place. However, for the first time since that night in 1862, there was music in the bookshop. For the first time since he had to leave his human friends, Aziraphale danced. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to tell you a story about an onion and a cactus.
> 
> In 2018, I had a small but beautiful garden on the balcony of my new apartment. It was thriving, I was proud of it, and I had plans to expand.  
> Within a few months, my mental health took a dive. Even pre-pandemic, I felt so isolated and alone. It was hard to get out of bed, to go to work and school, to feed myself, to do... anything. To water my plants. Out of neglect, I let my garden wither and die. It was a balcony garden, so not everything perished. Plants that could make do with the sun and rain as they came, those lived, but the ones who needed me, who needed my care and intervention... they didn't make it.  
> I still feel bad about that.
> 
> In 2019, still in that bad mental health spot & with no idea that worse was yet to come (personally AND globally,) I watched Good Omens. Crowley's panicky cruelty towards his plants hit me hard. I felt my guilt waking up again, but I also felt like I could relate to him. The narrative could have used that scene to show that Crowley was _such an evil, plant-murdering demon,_ but I felt like instead it framed his behavior as that of a desperate person backed into a corner using what unhealthy coping mechanisms were available. I had a tiny personal catharsis about the fact that the story didn't show that as proof that he was an irredeemable monster, just proof that he was hurt and scared.  
> Watching Good Omens didn't fix my mental health, but it DID do two things for me that helped me start to build it back up: It got me writing again after a 10-year slump, and it connected me with friends and a support network that made me feel like a part of a community. Both of those things helped give me motivation and space to start to grow again instead of withering.
> 
> In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic and in the aftermath of a truly shit 2019, I moved again. I finally threw out the corpses of the dead plants I'd left on my balcony for a year like a reminder of my sins. I packed up my last surviving plants, a single onion and a tiny cactus, and around those two survivors, I started a new garden.
> 
> Let me tell you about my onion. I got him when my previous garden was in full verdant splendor. He started life as a vegetable scrap from a restaurant I worked at that summer. I carried him home to my balcony in a wet paper towel and planted him in a ramen noodle bowl, and he grew strong. I don't even like the taste of green onion. I took him home and planted him because I wanted to see if I could save something that would otherwise go in the trash.  
> Let me tell you about my cactus. I got him as a gift from a family member around the same time, someone with whom I have a complicated relationship. He’d been spray painted purple by a seller trying to make him pretty for people who didn't know or care that it hurt a plant to seal it in paint. I thought he was doomed to suffocate. Instead, he grew. He slowly expanded out from his paint prison and began to reach for the sun.
> 
> It's 2021 now. The onion and the cactus survived a freak blizzard inside a room with no heat for a week. They’re a bit battered now, but the cactus and the onion survived. I hope they keep living. I hope they keep fighting to reach for the sun.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
> (I showed a few friends that story, written on my phone before I knew the plants would survive, and [Cyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynSyn), one of my absolute dearest friends both in the fandom and in general, drew me [art](https://64.media.tumblr.com/0b815217978055fdefa60733e4b051ff/6a75f4ca5455d50a-52/s2048x3072/2eaa2a1fe22b9a377093e6c9a020a4097e6d2fb5.png) of them and it definitely made me choke up.)
> 
> A ton of y’all have reached out to me to check in with how we were doing in the frozen hellscape, and y’all. That really meant so much. My household—including all our pets & those funky little chickens—survived and pulled through it fine. Full of rage at my government, but probably physically fine.  
> I know the whole world is on fire right now, but if you’re interested in helping Texans recover from this, there’s information on how to help collected [here.](https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-power-outage-help-warming-shelter/) Some of that info won’t be relevant now that the storm proper has passed, but the problems in our state will last long after the snow melts away. If you’re American, consider talking to your reps about efforts to hold people accountable for this travesty. And just remember, as always: the salvation army is a fucking hate group.  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> Next chapter—the _last_ chapter, wow—is going up **Thursday, March 11th** , or the 10th if I get impatient. ;) That’s my little birthday present to myself. See y’all then. <3

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to DM me on [Tumblr](https://noodlefrog-omens.tumblr.com) (and if I remember, I’ll also post information about updates on there). If you’re on The Discord, feel free to DM me there too. I’m **Pliny the Elder#3717**. I hoard every single comment I receive in my grubby little author nest, and I make a habit of responding at least once to each one I get, though sometimes it may take a bit.


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